Ethnic and religious unity is a thing that every country wishes for not exempting Malaysia. Tolerance among the population is very much expected to achieve this. Nevertheless, ethnic and religious diversity in Malaysia is often seen as a challenge for realizing tolerance and thus creating unity. Therefore, this paper aims to analyse the barrier factors for ethnic and religious tolerance while at the same time identifying proposals for improvement measures to tolerance among the community. Hence, the Focus Group Discussion or FGD study design was used by involving 72 youth informants from various ethnicities which comprised of Malay, Chinese, Indians and Bumiputera in Malaysia as information suppliers. As a result of the analysis it can be concluded that there are six themes that exist as a barrier factor to ethnic and religious tolerance, that are (i) social gap; 50.10 percent, (ii) religious differences; 13.82 percent, (iii) economic inequality; 12.16 percent, (iv) political conflict; 11.75 percent, (v) rights and privileges issues; 7.84 percent, and (vi) primordial sentiment; 4.33 percent. This issue is important to be examined because by investigating barriers to ethnic and religious tolerance, the best tolerance approach or method can be planned and implemented to ensure that Malaysians are united and thus can drive to the stability and progress of the country.