QRIS Merchant Discount Rate 2026: Acceptance Cost, Line by Line

Until 30 September 2026, an Indonesian merchant in the regular Usaha Kecil, Menengah or Besar classes pays a 0.7% merchant discount rate on the full value of every QRIS transaction — the schedule in force since 15 March 2025. From 1 October 2026, MDR drops to 0% on transactions up to Rp100,000 for those same categories, "dari yang sebelumnya sebesar 0,7%", while Usaha Mikro keeps 0% up to Rp500,000 (Bank Indonesia Press Release No. 28/159/DKom, 17 August 2026). Special-category rates still override merchant size: education 0.6%, fuel stations 0.4%, and BLU, PSO, G2P, P2G and non-profit donations 0%.

None of those numbers is your acceptance cost. For a bank, insurer, multifinance company or listed issuer taking payments on its own channels, MDR is one line out of five. Two of the others reach a rate card only in part, and the last two appear nowhere except your own ledger — and those last two are usually larger than the rate difference being argued over at the negotiating table.

Five acceptance cost lines, and who sets each one

Cost line	Set by	Verified figure	On the rate card?
QRIS MDR	Bank Indonesia (administered)	0.7% for UKE/UME/UBE to 30 Sep 2026; 0% on transactions ≤Rp100,000 from 1 Oct 2026	Yes
Gateway / PJP fee above MDR	The provider, in the space BI leaves open	Midtrans: cards 2.9% + Rp2,000; QRIS 0.7%; GoPay 2%; ShopeePay 2%; DANA 1.5%; virtual account Rp4,000 flat	Partly
Settlement and fund transfer fees	Contract	InterActive: Rp3,000 per settlement, Rp5,900 where the destination account sits outside BCA, Mandiri, BNI or BRI	Rarely
Carry cost of funds in transit (float)	Nobody sets it	2.21 bps per calendar day at 8.07% p.a.	No
Reconciliation and core/ERP integration	Your own project budget	A one-off build plus a standing operational load	No

Lines two and three come from the Midtrans pricing page and the InterActive QRIS fee schedule, read on 5 September 2026. One sentence on the Midtrans page moves every number in its own column: "Semua biaya transaksi tidak termasuk Pajak Pertambahan Nilai (PPN), kecuali untuk QRIS, GoPay, dan ShopeePay" — every fee excludes VAT except those three. The card rate of 2.9% + Rp2,000 is therefore not the final figure. Line four is worked out below.

The MDR schedule now, and the one that starts on 1 October 2026

Merchant category	To 30 September 2026	From 1 October 2026
Usaha Mikro (UMI), transaction ≤Rp500,000	0%	0% — unchanged
Usaha Mikro (UMI), transaction >Rp500,000	0.3%	0.3% — unchanged
Usaha Kecil, Menengah, Besar (UKE/UME/UBE)	0.7% from the first rupiah	0% up to Rp100,000; above that, not yet restated
Education	0.6%	0.6% — BI's release does not address it
Fuel stations (SPBU)	0.4%	0.4% — BI's release does not address it
BLU, PSO, G2P, P2G, non-profit donations	0%	0% — unchanged

The middle column comes from Bank Indonesia's MDR QRIS explainer, which dates the schedule "berlaku efektif mulai 15 Maret 2025 sebagaimana tertuang dalam Siaran Pers RDG Februari 2025". The right column comes from the August press release. Read that page carefully before you quote it: its footer says "Halaman ini terakhir diperbarui 5/6/2025", and when we read it on 5 September 2026 — three weeks after the announcement — the string "Rp100.000" did not appear on it once. Bank Indonesia has announced the rate change and has not yet published the rate table that implements it. That is why the above-threshold cell in our table is left open: a return to 0.7% is a reasonable inference, not a sentence BI has written.

The same page settles a question commercial teams keep asking: "biaya MDR ini ditanggung oleh merchant dan tidak boleh dibebankan kepada konsumen". The merchant bears MDR and may not pass it to the customer. There is no lawful surcharge.

Size the change on your ticket distribution, not your blended rate, because the whole saving sits below Rp100,000. A UBE merchant with a Rp75,000 average ticket pays Rp525 per transaction today and nothing from 1 October; at 50,000 transactions a month that is Rp26.25 million of monthly acquiring cost that simply stops. An FY2027 budget built on a flat 0.7% is overstated by whatever share of volume falls under the threshold.

MDR is charged on the whole transaction, and BI deleted the example that proves it

The page is still titled "MDR QRIS Bagi Merchant: Kategorisasi dan Simulasi", but the Simulasi columns went in the 6 May 2025 edit. The worked example survives in the Internet Archive capture of 6 December 2023. At a Nilai Transaksi of Rp200,000, BI priced a micro merchant on "0.3% (>Rp100.000)" at Rp600 — 0.3% of the whole Rp200,000, where charging only the excess would have given Rp300. Every other row matches rate times full nominal: 0.7% gives Rp1,400, education 0.6% gives Rp1,200, SPBU/BLU/PSO 0.4% gives Rp800.

One acquirer still publishes the same arithmetic today. The simulation on Bank Sinarmas's tariff page shows a Rp600,000 micro-merchant transaction at 0.3% leaving Rp598,200 in the merchant's account — a deduction of Rp1,800, which is 0.3% of the full amount, not Rp300 on the excess over Rp500,000. So after 1 October 2026 a Rp150,000 transaction for an Usaha Besar merchant costs Rp1,050, not Rp350: the threshold switches the rate on, it does not carve the base. Get it confirmed in writing anyway, because the implementing table does not yet exist.

Two of the ten pages Google ranks for "mdr qris" misprice it, in opposite directions

BI changed the schedule on 15 March 2025: SPBU stayed at 0.4%, BLU and PSO dropped to 0%. Before that, BI's own table read "SPBU, BLU dan PSO 0.4%". We pulled the Indonesian SERP for "mdr qris" on 5 September 2026 and read the ranking pages. Bank Sinarmas still prints that pre-2025 grouping verbatim, on a notice headed "Efektif 1 Desember" — eighteen months stale, and a BLU merchant reading it would budget 0.4% on a service BI now prices at 0%. GoPay fails the other way. Its SPBU/BLU/PSO split is current, but it adds a category BI has never published: "Pendidikan & Kesehatan | Semua nominal | 0,6%", worked through with a patient paying Rp1,000,000 for treatment and losing Rp6,000. The word "kesehatan" does not appear on BI's schedule at all. A hospital that is not a BLU is UKE, UME or UBE, at 0.7%. GoPay also sources its table to Surat Deputi Gubernur BI No. 26/3/KEP.DpG/2024, effective 1 December 2024, for a table that actually reflects the March 2025 revision.

Those two errors are not the same kind of error. One is stale; one is invented. For a hospital or a BLU copying a rate off the first page of Google, both end as a wrong budget line.

MDR is set by decision, not by regulation

This matters most to anyone building a three-year cost model, and it is on none of the pages currently ranking for the term. Since 31 March 2026, payment-system pricing has been governed by PBI No. 10 of 2025 on Pengaturan Industri Sistem Pembayaran. The phrase "merchant discount rate" occurs exactly once in the whole document, and not in the operative text: the Elucidation of Article 15(3)(c) gives it as an example of a pricing policy from a PJP to a goods or services provider.

The Elucidation of Article 15(4) settles the rest: "Bentuk penetapan kebijakan skema harga (pricing) antara lain berupa peraturan Bank Indonesia atau keputusan Bank Indonesia." MDR can move by decision, with no rulemaking and no public consultation — which is what happened on 17 August 2026, through a press release. Treat MDR as a variable with a sensitivity, not a contractual constant, and put a tariff pass-through mechanism into the acquiring agreement. Article 16(2) adds that where BI sets no policy, "PSP dapat menetapkan skema harga (pricing) sesuai dengan aktivitas yang diselenggarakan". Gateway fees live in that gap. MDR is not negotiable; gateway fees are, and that is the only tariff line genuinely on your table.

The implementing rule, PADG No. 32 of 2025, fences it at Article 49(2): a PSP may price "sepanjang tidak bertentangan dengan kebijakan skema harga (pricing) Bank Indonesia". So a provider still charging 0.7% on QRIS transactions of Rp100,000 or less after 1 October 2026 is charging above the administered rate. That is not hypothetical. On 5 September 2026 the Midtrans price page still listed QRIS at a flat 0.7% with no threshold. It has three weeks to change. Book the contract review before the date, not after.

Settlement float: the biggest line on nobody's rate card

We read PADG 21/18/PADG/2019, PADG 24/1/PADG/2022, PADG 3 of 2025 with its FAQ, and all 163 pages of PADG 32 of 2025. No Bank Indonesia rule sets a deadline for an acquirer or PJP to pass funds through to a merchant. Settlement appears as a processing stage in Article 5(1), as a reconciliation and risk-management duty, and as a credit-risk exposure — never as a number of days. The day count is contractual. BI fixed the price and left the float free. Below is what the providers publish themselves, read on 5 September 2026.

Provider	Channel	Published settlement
Bank Sinarmas (acquiring bank)	QRIS	"Dana pembayaran pelanggan diterima secara real time"
Xendit	Virtual account	T+1 business days for BCA; other VAs "INSTANT"
Xendit	QRIS	T+2 business days
Xendit	Cards, and Alfamart / Indomaret retail	T+5 business days
InterActive	QRIS	Working days and hours only; no settlement on Saturdays, Sundays, public holidays or collective leave
Midtrans	All channels	No published settlement SLA; payouts scheduled daily, weekly or monthly with a minimum amount and an interbank transfer fee

The first row against the fourth is the point of this article: the same rail, the same administered MDR, settlement running from real time to T+5 business days — depending only on whose contract you signed.

Pricing float with a number instead of an adjective

The right discount rate for money held back is your own cost of working capital. Per Table I.26 of the Indonesian Economic and Financial Statistics, the commercial-bank rupiah working capital lending rate in June 2026 was 8.07% per annum. What follows is WEBARQ arithmetic on that figure, not a Bank Indonesia statement:

• Every calendar day of settlement delay costs 2.21 basis points of settled value (8.07 ÷ 365).
• QRIS at T+2 business days across a weekend ≈ 4 calendar days ≈ 8.8 bps. On top of a 70 bps MDR that is a 12.6% increase in acceptance cost, printed on no rate card anywhere.
• Cards at T+5 business days ≈ 7 calendar days ≈ 15.5 bps, on top of the 2.9% + Rp2,000 that is printed.
• At Rp10 billion a month of card volume, the permanently trapped float is about Rp2.33 billion; the annual carry at 8.07% is roughly Rp188 million, or 0.157% of Rp120 billion of annual volume.
• Real-time settlement into an account at the same acquiring bank costs zero bps of float — a legitimate difference to bring into a tariff negotiation.

If you fund yourself at the policy rate instead, use the BI-Rate of 5.75%, set at the Board of Governors meeting of 19 August 2026, as a floor: 1.58 bps a day. The number shrinks; the direction does not.

Our view, and it's arguable: if you only get to take one line into the negotiation, don't take the tariff. MDR is administered and unmovable, and a few basis points off a gateway fee is usually worth less than two days of settlement. Timing is the one variable BI does not set, no rate card prints, and a single contract clause can change.

Above Rp357,143 a transaction, QRIS is the expensive rail

MDR is a percentage. BI-FAST is capped in rupiah: Rp2,500 per transaction for Individual Credit Transfer and Request for Payment, Rp2,100 per individual transaction for Bulk Credit Transfer, and Rp2,500 to the Biller for Direct Debit (BI-FAST FAQ, Bank Indonesia, which also caps a transaction at Rp250,000,000). The two structures cross at one point.

Transaction value	QRIS @ 0.7%	BI-FAST (cap)	Ratio
Rp50,000	Rp350	Rp2,500	0.1×
Rp250,000	Rp1,750	Rp2,500	0.7×
Rp357,143	Rp2,500	Rp2,500	1.0× — the crossover
Rp1,500,000	Rp10,500	Rp2,500	4.2×
Rp5,000,000	Rp35,000	Rp2,500	14×

Almost all institutional collection sits above that line: premiums, instalments, card repayments, school fees, subscription billing. BI-FAST Direct Debit, rolled out in phases since 21 December 2024, is defined by BI itself for "pembayaran cicilan leasing, premi asuransi, dan tagihan rutin lainnya" at a flat Rp2,500 to the Biller. For calibration: BI-FAST carried 546 million transactions worth Rp1,355 trillion in July 2026 (BI Press Release No. 28/162/DKom, 19 August 2026), so the average transfer is Rp2.48 million and the Rp2,500 cap is 0.101% of it — one seventh of 0.7%. We compare the rails one by one in Indonesia payment gateway, BI-FAST and QRIS.

What you can demand contractually

1. A settlement SLA, in writing, with a number in it. Article 186 of PADG 32/2025 requires a PJP administering funds and forwarding payment transactions to meet a "standar minimum kontraktual" covering at least rights and obligations, a service level agreement, and product or service transparency. That is a regulatory obligation, not a commercial concession. Ask for days, not the word "fast".
2. Price transparency as the basis for a tariff audit. Article 49(3) obliges PSPs, Participants and Supporting Providers to meet the price transparency principle — enough ground to demand a per-line breakdown rather than one blended number.
3. The standing of your money while it sits. Where the provider administers funds as electronic money, which is what a wallet balance or gateway float account is, Articles 23 and 24 require float to be booked to immediate liabilities (pos kewajiban segera atau rupa-rupa pasiva), used only to meet obligations to users and merchants, and recorded separately from the provider's other liabilities. Your money at a gateway is a segregated liability, not the provider's asset.

A fourth lever procurement teams rarely pull: PADG 32/2025 requires ongoing capital of at least 10% of risk-weighted transactions (Article 162(3)(a)(1)), sets those at ten times the transaction charge (Article 166(1)), and tiers the charge on nominal processed — 4% up to Rp100 billion, 1% to Rp1 trillion, 0.1% above (Article 166(2)(a)). Multiplied out, our arithmetic gives base ongoing capital of about 4% of processed nominal in the first tier and about 0.1% above Rp1 trillion: a small gateway carries roughly forty times the capital per rupiah that a large one does. The cheapest price on your shortlist is a solvency question, not only a tariff question.

When you have to tell customers, and when you do not

POJK No. 22 of 2023 requires at Article 49(2) that a PUJK notify consumers of a change in terms affecting the agreement at least 30 working days before it takes effect. Article 49(4)(a) and (b) exempt a change "ditetapkan oleh pemerintah atau otoritas" or a change in a pricing reference set by an authority. The 1 October 2026 MDR change sits squarely inside that exemption; repricing on your own commercial grounds does not. Article 45(1) separately requires a PUJK to explain costs to a prospective consumer, with an administrative fine of up to Rp15 billion. Separate the two cases before the channel team treats them alike.

The line that is most often under-budgeted

Switching payment acceptance on is cheap. Wiring it in is not. On 5 September 2026 we scanned every client record in our own CMS — 264 records, the 214 live ones (13 full case studies and 201 portfolio entries) plus 50 archived, in both languages, across 14,611 stored content fields. QRIS, BI-FAST, MDR, Midtrans and Xendit appear zero times. "Payment gateway" appears exactly twice, both on archived records no longer published. So we will not pretend to speak from experience of connecting a payment rail. What we can show is the cost line around it, and that is the one budgets miss.

At MSIG, the platform "links directly with MSIG's core financial systems to streamline policy sales, premium collections, and customer financial interactions". The first challenge that case study records is not about taking the money: "Ensuring a seamless transition from traditional to digital without disrupting ongoing operations." That sentence is the real cost — wiring receipt into the system of record while the live service keeps serving. At PFI Mega Life, the build "seamlessly connects with PFI Megalife's internal enterprise resource planning systems to ensure accurate and efficient processing of purchases and financial transactions", and the e-policy system deliberately "does not support auto-renewal to give customers greater control over their policies" — a recurring-billing decision taken against the commercial grain.

The size of the problem is countable from our own portfolio. Of 214 live clients, 42 are in banking and financial services. Those 42 carry 43 work-type tags between them, because one client holds two: 38 website builds, 3 e-commerce, 1 mobile app, 1 social media. Cloud native: none. Fewer than one in ten financial-services clients got a build that actually transacts. Not because of the MDR, but because the integration and reconciliation lines never entered the opening budget. The technical shape of that work is in bank host-to-host versus payment gateway integration, the compliance side in SNAP BI Open API compliance. Where the core or ERP layer is the constraint, that is our website and application development and cloud native work.

The decision pack to have ready before 1 October 2026

1. MDR by merchant category, quoted from Bank Indonesia with its effective date and both schedules side by side — not from an acquirer's tariff notice.
2. The acquirer's written answer on the calculation base above Rp100,000. BI's own deleted simulation charged the full nominal.
3. Your ticket-size distribution, not your blended rate: the entire 1 October saving sits below Rp100,000.
4. Gateway fees above MDR per channel, plus settlement fees, interbank transfer fees, and which of them carry VAT.
5. A settlement SLA in days, cited to Article 186 of PADG 32/2025 if the provider refuses a number.
6. Float carry cost at your own cost of funds, per channel, carried into the tariff comparison.
7. Recurring collections above Rp357,143 per transaction, tested against BI-FAST Direct Debit.
8. Integration and reconciliation to core or ERP as its own budget line, not an assumption.

Method: regulatory figures read from the issuing bodies (bi.go.id, ojk.go.id) on 5 September 2026; settlement terms and tariffs from providers' own public documentation on the same date, and they can change without notice. The carry-cost calculations, the crossover point and the capital ratios are WEBARQ arithmetic on quoted figures, not Bank Indonesia statements. Produced with AI assistance and verified against primary sources before publication.