Payment Processing · Buyer guide
In Oman the price of the most common card payment is printed in the banks' own tariffs. A payment on a debit card issued in Oman, which runs over the national OmanNet switch, costs a private business at most 1.5% of the sale or OMR 10, whichever is lower, plus 5% VAT on the fee. Since 1 July 2026 a QR-code payment from a customer's bank app costs at most 0.5%, capped at OMR 2. What is not published is the price of Visa, Mastercard and other international cards, which banks set by agreement, or anything the online payment companies charge.
This guide sets out the caps, what banks and gateways publish, the duty on many shops to offer electronic payment, and how to read a quote. Everything below was read on 15 November 2026. Amounts are in Omani rials (OMR); one rial is 1,000 baisa.
OmanNet is Oman's national card switch, run by the Central Bank of Oman (CBO), and it carries the debit cards Omani banks issue. When Amazon Payment Services launched OmanNet payments in 2023, the Oman Observer reported that OmanNet debit cards made up 95% of all cards in the country. Since 2016 the CBO has also run a payment gateway for those cards online, which it set up in part to control what merchants are charged.
In November 2025 the CBO began a pilot of Maal, a national card brand, and announced lower capped merchant fees for it at card terminals and on e-commerce gateways, with a lower cap for government bodies, fixed fees for exchange houses, preferential rates for small businesses holding the Riyada card and no fee for charities accepting zakat and donations. It said merchants would save up to 50% compared with other cards. The CBO did not publish the caps itself, but Bank Muscat's tariff lists them, as set out below. The CBO also warned that some terminals were not yet ready to accept the card.
The third rail is the CBO's instant payment system, MPCSS, which lets customers pay by phone number or by scanning a QR code. It is growing fastest: the CBO's 2025 payment systems report, covered by the Times of Oman on 15 November 2026, counted 339.36 million instant payments in 2025 and said electronic payments made up 89% of the transactions handled by banks and payment providers, by number. It also counted about 120,000 card terminals, including phones used as terminals, up about 18% in a year.
The caps appear in Bank Muscat's tariff book (version 2.12/2026), section 30 on merchant services:
Bank Dhofar's January 2026 tariff lists the same maxima for retail and government merchants across its POS and e-commerce services, without separating card types. The government services portal, gov.om, lists the same 1.5% and OMR 10 for a private business that links its payment gateway to the CBO's OmanNet gateway. Other banks, including National Bank of Oman and Sohar International, offer terminals and QR acceptance but did not publish a merchant rate that we could find. The figures are maximums: a bank can charge less, and a busy shop should ask.
The QR cap was 0.75% until the CBO cut it to 0.50% with an OMR 2 ceiling from 1 July 2026. At the same time it made local digital bank transfers free for individual customers and small businesses. In December 2022 the Oman Observer reported that the CBO had told providers to waive charges for card terminals, installation and monthly or annual fees, which matches the nil joining and terminal fees in Bank Muscat's tariff, although it adds an OMR 5 monthly minimum for low-use terminals.
Take a grocery or café with OMR 1,500 a month of sales on Omani debit cards, at an average of OMR 6 a sale. At the full 1.5% cap the bank fee is OMR 22.500, plus OMR 1.125 VAT: OMR 23.625 a month. On Maal cards at Bank Muscat's 0.85% maximum it would be OMR 12.750 plus OMR 0.638 VAT: OMR 13.388. If the same sales came through QR at 0.5%, the fee would be OMR 7.500 plus OMR 0.375 VAT: OMR 7.875. The caps bite on large tickets: a OMR 1,000 sale on a debit card costs at most OMR 10, or 1%, because 1.5% would be OMR 15, and the cap starts to bite above about OMR 667. On QR, the OMR 2 ceiling applies above OMR 400.
The unknown is everything else. A tourist's Visa card, a business credit card or an American Express card is charged at whatever rate you agree, and no Omani bank we checked publishes it. Get that rate in writing and ask whether it differs for cards issued abroad.
None of the payment companies we checked publishes an Omani price list, so every online rate in Oman is a quote. What they do publish:
Stripe (our grade: A) is not available to businesses in Oman. Thawani, which in 2020 became the first company the CBO licensed as a payment service provider, publishes no merchant fees either.
An online OmanNet payment works differently from an international card. Mastercard's gateway documentation describes OmanNet as a debit switch: the customer is sent to an OmanNet page to authorise the payment and then returned, the payment is in rials only, a refund cannot be issued more than 90 days after the purchase, and chargebacks do not apply. Ask any gateway how it handles OmanNet refunds before you rely on it for a returns-heavy business.
Ministerial Decision 386/2022 of the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Investment Promotion, published on 17 April 2022 and in force 30 days later, requires businesses in eight listed activities to give every consumer an electronic way to pay. The list covers food sales; gold and silver; restaurants and cafés; vegetables and fruit; electronics; building materials; tobacco; and all activities in industrial areas, complexes, commercial centres and gift markets. A business found without it can get a warning and up to 20 days to comply, or an administrative fine of OMR 100. Customers can still pay cash. Inspectors have been active: the Oman Observer reported that 1,183 of more than 4,900 stores inspected in 2023 were found non-compliant, and in March 2025 the ministry told shops to stop asking customers to pay by bank transfer to a phone number in place of providing electronic payment.
We found no Omani regulation that explicitly bans adding a fee for card payment, but the signals all point one way. In 2017 the consumer protection authority said that adding a percentage for paying by card was against the law, according to the Times of Oman, and Bank Dhofar's merchant agreement forbids a merchant to impose a surcharge as a condition of accepting a card, with breach a ground for termination. Treat a card surcharge as off limits and build payment costs into your prices.
Oman has charged VAT at 5% since 16 April 2021. Financial services are exempt, but not where the bank is paid by a fee, commission or discount, so the merchant discount rate carries VAT, as both bank tariffs show. Separately, Oman is introducing mandatory e-invoicing, called Fawtara: under a Tax Authority decision gazetted on 9 August 2026, whose dates a Tax Authority official confirmed to the Oman Observer, it becomes mandatory from 1 April 2027 for businesses with annual supplies above OMR 5 million and from 1 October 2027 for all other VAT-registered businesses.
For the rest of the Gulf, see our guides to card fees in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain.
