Industry · Payment Processing
On 1 October 2026 Bank Indonesia stopped charging most merchants for small QR payments. Under the change it announced on 17 August, the merchant discount rate (MDR) on a QRIS payment of up to Rp100,000 is now 0% for every merchant, whatever its size. Until September that 0% band covered only micro businesses; small, medium and large merchants paid 0.7% on every QRIS payment, however small.
Rp100,000 was worth about US$5.60 at Bank Indonesia's JISDOR reference rate of Rp17,884 to the dollar on 9 October 2026. For scale, Bank Indonesia's first-half figures work out at an average of about Rp89,000 per QRIS transaction. This guide sets out what the central bank's rules now say a merchant pays for QRIS and for debit cards, and what the online payment gateways that sit between a business and those rails add on top, read from their own price lists on 10 October 2026.
It is the opposite move to India's. Two weeks later, on 15 October, India is due to start charging merchants 0.4% on larger UPI payments, after years of free acceptance. Like Brazil with Pix, India and Indonesia each built a national instant payment system, and both are now deciding who pays to run it.
QRIS (Quick Response Code Indonesian Standard) is the national QR standard: one code at the till that any Indonesian bank app or e-wallet can scan. Bank Indonesia sets its MDR, the fee the merchant pays on each payment, by type of merchant. Combining its standing fee table with the 1 October change:
Bank Indonesia's own QRIS page had not caught up with its press release when we read it on 10 October: its fee table still shows 0.7% for small, medium and large merchants with no Rp100,000 band. The August release is the later and more specific source, and the 0% band for larger merchants applies from 1 October. A single QRIS payment is capped at Rp10 million.
The scale is large. Bank Indonesia says QRIS recorded 12.55 billion transactions worth Rp1.12 quadrillion in the first half of 2026, 93.92% more by value than a year earlier, and that it had 45.46 million merchants by July 2026, 96.69% of them micro, small and medium businesses.
Bank Indonesia's QRIS page says there are no additional fees for consumers when using QRIS. Its officials have been explicit that the rule binds the merchant. Speaking in Central Sulawesi in August, a deputy head of the central bank's provincial office said businesses may not pass the MDR back to the customer as an extra charge, an administration fee or under any other name because the customer chose to pay by QRIS, citing the 2019 QRIS implementing regulation and Bank Indonesia Regulation 10 of 2025, as reported by Liputan6 on 27 August 2026. So the MDR is a cost of doing business, and a QRIS surcharge on the bill breaks the rules.
That is a stricter line than in the United States, where surcharging cards is legal in most states within rules set by the networks and the states, as our guide to credit card surcharge rules explains. It is closer to Australia, where card surcharges ended on 1 October.
Domestic debit card payments in Indonesia go through the National Payment Gateway (GPN), and Bank Indonesia caps what a merchant pays on them. On a regular merchant the cap is 0.15% when the same bank issued the card and runs the merchant's terminal (on-us) and 1% when the banks differ (off-us). Education merchants are capped at 0.15% and 0.75%, petrol stations at 0.15% and 0.5%, and government payments and donations at 0%. Bank Indonesia's page also says all domestic payment transactions must be processed through GPN.
That domestic-processing rule is why Indonesia's payment system turns up in US trade policy. The US Trade Representative's 2025 report on foreign trade barriers complained that GPN rules require domestic debit and credit transactions to be switched by Indonesian institutions with a 20% foreign-ownership limit, and that US companies said international stakeholders were neither informed of the QRIS changes nor given a chance to explain their views. The US–Indonesia reciprocal trade agreement whose text USTR published in February 2026 does not name QRIS or GPN, but it commits Indonesia to keep letting US payment networks process domestic credit card and online card transactions across the border under the exemptions in its regulations, and to allow international chip standards for domestic card transactions, including contactless debit. None of that changes the fees in this guide today.
A shop that takes QRIS through its bank or e-wallet provider pays the MDR on each payment under Bank Indonesia's rules. An online business usually goes through a payment gateway that bundles QRIS, cards, bank virtual accounts, e-wallets and convenience-store cash behind one checkout, and the gateway sets its own price list. Three publish one. Midtrans and DOKU charge only for successful transactions.
Stripe, which many foreign software companies use elsewhere, lists Indonesia as a preview market reached through its sales team and publishes no Indonesian prices. A business selling into Indonesia from abroad should not assume its usual processor can take QRIS or local bank transfers at all.
Using the published rates, before VAT where it is added, here is what each gateway's price list implies for a QRIS payment, and for a card:
Two things follow. First, a fixed fee per transaction matters far more than the percentage on the payments QRIS is best at. A business taking many small QR payments online should price the fixed fee before it signs, and ask a gateway in writing how it charges a QRIS payment inside the 0% band. Second, the gap between QRIS and cards is large: on a Rp250,000 order a card costs about five times what QRIS does at Midtrans or DOKU, and more than twice as much at Xendit, where the fixed fee narrows the ratio.
QRIS now works across borders. Bank Indonesia lists Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, South Korea and China as partner countries, and says visitors from partner countries made 21 million QRIS transactions in Indonesia worth Rp5.90 trillion up to July 2026. According to Bank Indonesia's QRIS page, a merchant accepting one of these payments is paid in rupiah and pays the same MDR as on a domestic QRIS payment, with no extra fee for the cross-border payment.
