Industry · Payment Processing
Saudi Arabia went cashless faster than its own targets. The Saudi Central Bank (SAMA) said in April 2026 that electronic payments made up 85% of retail payments in 2025, up from 79% in 2024, against a goal of 70% by 2025 that it reached in 2023, two years early. Since August 2020 the Ministry of Commerce has required every retail outlet to offer electronic payment. For a business, the question is no longer whether to take cards but what each one costs.
This guide sets out what a business pays to accept mada, Visa, Mastercard, Apple Pay and buy now, pay later in Saudi Arabia, read from banks' and gateways' own price lists and SAMA's rulebook in October 2026. Fees are in Saudi riyals and, unless stated, exclude 15% VAT.
mada is Saudi Arabia's domestic debit network, run by Saudi Payments under SAMA, and the card most Saudi customers carry. SAMA's rulebook still sets out the mada merchant service charge from its 2015 business rules: a maximum of 0.8% of the purchase, capped at SAR 40 per transaction. Some banks' own mada pages repeat that figure.
The price lists merchants are actually given say something else. Al Rajhi Bank's merchant pricing sheet charges 0.7% on mada payments of SAR 100 or below and 0.8% above that, capped at SAR 160. Bank Albilad's terminal application form (its file is dated October 2023) sets the same rates and the same SAR 160 cap, and Geidea's merchant terms dated 17 August 2025 do too. We could not find the SAMA circular that replaced the SAR 40 cap with SAR 160, so we report both. For most shops it makes no difference: the cap only bites on a single mada payment above SAR 5,000 under the older rule, or above SAR 20,000 under the newer one.
Two sectors have fixed fees for mada in SAMA's rules: a petrol station pays no more than 7 halalas per mada payment for fuel, whatever the amount, which the banks' sheets repeat, and a remittance centre no more than SAR 1 per mada payment.
We found no SAMA cap on what a merchant pays for a credit card, and the banks price them well above mada. Al Rajhi's sheet charges domestic credit cards between 1.25% plus 15 halalas and 2.5% depending on the type of business, with 2.5% for its general category and a flat SAR 0.50 at petrol stations, and 2.5% plus 10 halalas on international cards. Bank Albilad lists credit cards at 2.5%. Geidea's published fee schedule for freelance merchants lists credit cards at 2.75% plus SAR 1.
Cards issued in the other Gulf states are priced under a separate GCC policy in SAMA's rulebook: 1.5% of the transaction, capped at SAR 80, a rate Bank Albilad's form repeats.
Fixed charges vary more than rates. Bank Albilad charges SAR 100 a month when a terminal's sales fall below SAR 15,000 in the month, and Al Rajhi also applies a low-volume fee below SAR 15,000 a month. Geidea's freelancer plans charge SAR 899 a year for SoftPOS on a phone, or SAR 1,499 for a terminal in the first year and SAR 1,799 a year after that, with a SAR 120 chargeback fee.
SAMA's 2018 rule on mada for e-commerce, still on the rulebook, allows up to 1.75% per purchase with no cap. Tap Payments wrote in September 2023 that mada fees moved to 1% with a SAR 200 cap from 1 September 2023, and every gateway that publishes a Saudi price now charges about 1% for mada. The differences are in the cards and the fixed fees. As of October 2026:
Stripe does not serve Saudi businesses: its list of supported countries includes the UAE but not Saudi Arabia.
The flat SAR 1 is what separates these price lists on everyday orders. On a SAR 50 mada order, 1% + SAR 1 is SAR 1.50, or 3% of the sale, against 35 halalas (0.7%) for the same card tapped at a bank terminal. On a SAR 500 mada order it is SAR 6, or 1.2%, against SAR 4 at the till. On a SAR 500 local credit card order, Paymob's 2.7% + SAR 1 is SAR 14.50 and Tap's listed 2.5% + SAR 1 is SAR 13.50, before VAT. If your average basket is small, the fixed fee and the monthly charge matter more than the percentage.
Apple Pay is common at Saudi checkouts, and a merchant does not pay a separate Apple Pay rate. A payment made with a mada card in Apple Pay is charged as mada; Tap's 2023 note on mada fees said the 1% applied whether or not the payment came through Apple Pay. A credit card in Apple Pay is charged as that credit card. The one exception we found is a platform fee: PayTabs charges SAR 200 a month for Apple Pay through Shopify. Our guide to digital wallet fees explains why wallets usually cost the card rate.
Buy now, pay later is well established in Saudi Arabia, and the two best-known providers both hold SAMA finance-company licences: Tamara since March 2025 and Tabby since November 2025, having operated under SAMA buy now, pay later permits since 2023. Neither publishes its merchant rates. Tabby charges a percentage commission set by industry and business profile plus a fixed fee per order; Tamara sets each merchant's fees in its onboarding form. Both charge for payouts: Tabby SAR 6 per weekly payout, or SAR 25 when the payout is under SAR 2,500, and Tamara SAR 25 on a weekly-plan payout under SAR 2,500. In the US, where some providers do publish, buy now, pay later costs a merchant about twice what a card does, as our guide to BNPL merchant fees sets out.
SAMA's BNPL rules limit what the customer can be charged. A BNPL company may not charge the consumer fees, including fees owed to the store, apart from late-payment penalties and collection costs, and it must oblige the stores it works with not to pass any additional fees to the consumer.
That rule runs through every payment type. SAMA's credit card rules, issued in June 2025 and in force since September 2025, require issuers to give their merchant customers the right not to impose additional fees when a customer pays by credit card. The GCC card pricing policy says none of its fee may be passed on to the customer, and Geidea's merchant terms also bar surcharges. Unlike in most US states, where a merchant may add a card surcharge within the networks' rules (our guide to US surcharging rules covers them), there is no surcharging regime to opt into: the card fee is a cost of doing business, and the only lever is the price you negotiate.
