Every published Saudi payment gateway rate in one table: mada, Visa, Apple Pay, STC Pay, Tabby, Tamara. Plus settlement times T+1 to T+5, hidden fees, and worked examples for real store volumes.
How much are payment gateway fees in Saudi Arabia?
Published Saudi gateway rates run about 2.5–2.9% + SAR 1 per card transaction, with online mada cheaper (roughly 1.5–2.5%) and in-store mada regulated at 0.80%, capped at SAR 40. Tabby and Tamara charge merchants roughly 2.5–6%. Settlement takes T+1 to T+5 business days depending on the gateway.
- Moyasar is the only Saudi gateway with a full public rate card (~2.5% mada, ~2.75% + SAR 1 cards).
- The regulated 0.80% / SAR 40 mada cap applies in-store, not online.
- Apple Pay adds no merchant fee; you pay the rate of the card inside the wallet.
- Hidden costs: chargebacks, unrefunded MDR on returns, FX surcharges, and VAT on fees.
TL;DR
- • Published Saudi gateway card rates cluster at 2.5–2.9% + SAR 1 per transaction; mada runs cheaper than Visa/Mastercard on every gateway that publishes a rate.
- • The regulated mada cap (0.80%, max SAR 40) applies to in-store POS acquiring, not to online gateway pricing.
- • Apple Pay adds no merchant fee of its own; you pay the rate of the card inside the wallet.
- • Tabby and Tamara merchant fees run roughly 2.5–6% by category and tenor, about double the card rails.
- • Settlement ranges from T+1 (HyperPay) to T+5 (PayTabs worst case); the gap is real working capital.
Payment gateway fees in Saudi Arabia are the one line on your cost sheet that scales with every single sale, and most of the pages that rank for this query still answer with "it depends." This page answers with numbers. Electronic payments now carry 85% of Saudi retail transactions (SAMA via Saudi Press Agency, 2026), so for an online store the gateway's cut is not a technicality. It is a permanent business partner taking a slice of everything.
Below is every published rate we track across the Saudi gateways, what mada actually costs online versus in-store, what Apple Pay and STC Pay add to the bill, Tabby and Tamara's merchant fees, settlement speed gateway by gateway, and the charges that never appear on a pricing page. The rates come from the same dataset behind our Saudi payment gateway comparison, verified against public pricing as of May 2026. Where a gateway refuses to publish a rate, we say so instead of guessing.
The three lines on every Saudi gateway bill
Every gateway invoice in the Kingdom reduces to three components, and quotes only make sense once you separate them.
1. The transaction rate (MDR). The percentage of each sale the gateway keeps, called the merchant discount rate. This is the number gateways advertise, and it differs by payment method: mada is priced lower than Visa and Mastercard everywhere a public rate exists, because the national scheme's costs are lower and SAMA keeps pressure on the rail.
2. The fixed per-transaction fee. Usually SAR 1 per transaction, SAR 0.30 at Tap. Trivial on a SAR 500 basket, brutal on SAR 15 app orders. A store selling many small tickets should weight this fee more heavily than the headline percentage: on a SAR 20 order, SAR 1 fixed is an extra five percentage points.
3. Account fees. Setup (zero to roughly SAR 1,500 in the public market data), sometimes a monthly fee (zero to roughly SAR 250), occasionally a maintenance charge that activates only if your volume is low. These are the most negotiable line and the first thing waived when a gateway wants your business.
If a quote gives you one blended number, ask for the split. A "2.9% all-in" quote can hide a card rate you could beat and a fixed fee you cannot see.
For a quick visual orientation before the tables, this short walkthrough compares the two Saudi-native gateways most SMEs shortlist first:
How to Get a Payment Gateway in Saudi Arabia 2026 — Moyasar vs HyperPay
Watch on YouTube
The video covers onboarding; what it skips, and what the rest of this page covers, is what those two gateways and their competitors actually charge once you are live.
mada fees online are not mada fees in-store
This is the single most misunderstood number in Saudi payments, and getting it wrong skews every cost projection.
In-store, mada acquiring is regulated. A bank may charge a merchant at most 0.80% per mada POS transaction, capped at SAR 40 regardless of ticket size (mada merchant FAQ). A SAR 20,000 sale over the counter costs at most SAR 40 to accept.
Online, that cap does not apply to what you pay. An e-commerce mada transaction flows through a SAMA-licensed payment service provider, and the PSP prices its own layer: gateway infrastructure, fraud screening, 3-D Secure, integration support. Moyasar, the one Saudi gateway that publishes its pricing openly, lists mada around 2.5% for online transactions. Cheaper than its card rate, far above the in-store cap.
The practical rule: mada is your cheapest online rail, but plan online mada at gateway rates (roughly 1.5–2.5% in the public market data), not at the 0.80% POS cap. Projections built on the cap miss by a factor of two or three.
The scale of the rail is why every gateway leads with it: mada processed over 8.9 billion transactions worth more than SAR 613.9 billion in 2023 (mada official statistics, 2023). A Saudi checkout without mada is not a checkout; the fee question is only ever how much, never whether.
Saudi payment gateway fees: the 2026 table
Published and market rates as of May 2026, from the dataset behind our gateway comparison and finder tool. We score gateways there through the Ijjad PAYGATE Framework (PAYGATE-5); the full per-gateway scorecard lives on that page, and the underlying data is downloadable as a CSV comparison sheet. The two PAYGATE-5 lenses that matter for this page are Pricing transparency and Yield (what settlement does to your cash). "Negotiated only" means the gateway has no public rate card, which is itself information: merchants who cannot compare tend to pay more.
| Gateway | mada (online) | Visa / Mastercard | Settlement | Pricing transparency |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Moyasar | ~2.5% (published) | ~2.75% + SAR 1 (published) | T+1 to T+3 | Full public rate card |
| HyperPay | Quoted per merchant | ~2.5% + SAR 1 (negotiable at volume) | T+1 to T+2 | Sales-led quotes |
| Tap Payments | Quoted per merchant | ~2.85% + SAR 0.30 | T+2 to T+3 | Partial public pricing |
| Amazon Payment Services | Quoted per merchant | ~2.5% + SAR 1 | T+2 to T+3 | Sales-led quotes |
| MyFatoorah | Quoted per merchant | ~2.5–2.9% + SAR 1 | T+3 typical | Partial public pricing |
| PayTabs | Negotiated only | Negotiated only | T+2 to T+5 | No public rate card |
| Checkout.com | Via Saudi acquirer | Interchange++ (negotiated) | T+2 (configurable) | Contract pricing |
| Stripe (foreign entities only) | Not supported | ~2.9% + SAR 1 | T+7 typical | Full public rate card |
Rates move and promotions come and go; treat this as the market map, then get two live quotes before signing. Setup fees in the public market data range from SAR 0 to roughly SAR 1,500, monthly fees from SAR 0 to roughly SAR 250, and both are routinely waived for committed volume.
Two positions worth stating plainly. First, for a Saudi-only SME comparing blind quotes, Moyasar's published rate card is worth real money even when a competitor's negotiated quote comes in slightly lower, because you can hold a published number to account and renegotiate against it. Second, PayTabs' opacity is not a red flag about the processor, which is battle-tested at scale; it is a red flag about what a small merchant with no leverage will end up paying.
If you are still choosing a platform as well as a gateway, our Saudi payment gateway integration guide covers the build side: Salla and Zid bundle their own payment stack, while custom builds and Shopify stores pick from the table above.
Apple Pay and STC Pay: what they add to the bill
Less than most merchants expect.
Apple Pay is not a payment network. It is a wallet that tokenizes a card, so the transaction settles on whatever card is inside: a mada card pays your mada rate, a Visa pays your Visa rate. Apple's own materials state there are no additional merchant fees to accept Apple Pay (Apple Pay overview); the issuing banks compensate Apple, not you. Given Apple Pay's weight in Saudi online checkouts, enabling it is close to free conversion. There is no fee reason to leave it off.
STC Pay is a genuine wallet balance, so it does carry its own acceptance pricing, set by your gateway rather than published as a national tariff. In practice gateways quote wallet acceptance at or near card rates. Ask for the STC Pay line on the rate card specifically; if the quote is silent on it, the omission usually resolves against you after go-live.
Tabby and Tamara: the BNPL merchant fee
Buy-now-pay-later is the expensive rail, and it is priced that way because it is doing a different job: underwriting your customer's installments and paying you upfront.
Tabby
Merchant discount rate roughly 2.79–5.99% depending on category and installment tenor. Strong in fashion and lifestyle, GCC-wide footprint, native plugins for Shopify, Salla, Zid, and WooCommerce.
Tamara
Merchant discount rate roughly 2.5–6%. Saudi-first, Sharia-compliant with no customer late fees, Riyadh product team. The default pick for a conservative Saudi-only buyer base.
Neither publishes a rate card; both quote per merchant by category, ticket size, and tenor. At a 5% MDR, a SAR 400 basket costs SAR 20 to accept versus about SAR 10 on mada. Whether that premium pays for itself depends entirely on whether BNPL brings you orders that would not otherwise happen. BNPL carries roughly 35–40% of Saudi e-commerce checkouts, so for fashion, beauty, and electronics the answer is usually yes; for a B2B service invoice it is usually no. Negotiate the category rate before launch, not after, and revisit it once you have six months of volume data.
Settlement times: the fee nobody prices
Settlement is when the money you already earned reaches your bank account, expressed as T+N business days. Merchants shop rates obsessively and accept whatever settlement terms appear in the contract, which is backwards for any business that buys inventory.
Take a store selling SAR 5,000 a day. On T+1 settlement, one day of sales is in transit at any moment: SAR 5,000 you cannot spend. On T+5, five days float: SAR 25,000 locked up permanently. The gap between the fastest and slowest Saudi gateways is SAR 20,000 of working capital on this volume, every day of the year, and it widens exactly when sales spike in Ramadan and White Friday, when you also need cash for restocking.
A gateway charging 0.2% more but settling T+1 instead of T+5 is often the cheaper gateway once you price the float. If you carry inventory, weight settlement as heavily as the MDR.
From the table above: HyperPay settles T+1 to T+2 into Saudi banks, Moyasar T+1 to T+3, Tap and Amazon Payment Services T+2 to T+3, MyFatoorah around T+3, PayTabs T+2 stretching to T+5, and Stripe's international flow runs around T+7, one more reason it only fits foreign-incorporated entities.
The fees that never appear on the pricing page
Every number so far is the advertised cost. The gap between advertised and effective cost comes from five places.
Chargebacks. When a customer disputes a transaction, you lose the sale amount and pay a dispute fee on top; Checkout.com's published chargeback fee is USD 15, and the market runs in that band. mada's debit nature keeps dispute rates lower than credit cards, one more quiet advantage of the local rail.
Refunds. On most gateways, refunding a customer does not refund the MDR you paid. A store with a 15% return rate is paying acceptance fees on gross sales while keeping revenue on net. Ask every gateway, in writing, whether fees are returned on refunds.
Foreign cards and FX. A Visa issued abroad typically carries a 1–1.5% surcharge over the domestic card rate, and if you price in anything other than SAR, a conversion margin rides on top. Tourist-facing and export businesses should get the international-card line quoted explicitly.
VAT on the fees themselves. Gateway invoices are commercial services and typically carry 15% VAT on the fee line. Ask whether a quoted rate is VAT-inclusive; a "2.5%" that becomes 2.875% after VAT changes a tight-margin business's math. Your ZATCA e-invoicing setup should reconcile against the gateway's fee invoices, not just its payout reports.
Minimums and dormancy. Some contracts add a monthly maintenance charge that activates only under a volume floor, which is exactly the period when a new store can least afford it. Read for it before signing.
What a real store actually pays: three worked examples
Advertised rates only become a business cost when you multiply them against your own basket size and payment mix. Three common Saudi profiles, using the published Moyasar-style rates from the table (mada ~2.5%, cards ~2.75% + SAR 1):
Riyadh retail store — SAR 30,000/month, 200 orders, 70% mada / 30% cards
mada: SAR 21,000 × 2.5% = SAR 525. Cards: SAR 9,000 × 2.75% + 60 orders × SAR 1 = SAR 307.50. Total ≈ SAR 833/month, an effective 2.8% of revenue. The mada-heavy mix is doing the saving: flip the mix to 70% cards and the bill rises.
Jeddah fashion brand — SAR 60,000/month, 40% via BNPL at ~5% MDR
BNPL: SAR 24,000 × 5% = SAR 1,200. The remaining SAR 36,000 on card/mada rails ≈ SAR 1,000. Total ≈ SAR 2,200/month, an effective 3.7%. BNPL nearly doubles the acceptance cost of the volume it touches; it has to earn that back in orders that would not exist without installments.
Amman-to-Riyadh B2B services firm — 20 invoices/month averaging SAR 8,000
By online card link: SAR 8,000 × 2.75% + SAR 1 = SAR 221 per invoice, SAR 4,420/month. The same client paying in person on a mada POS terminal hits the regulated SAR 40 cap: SAR 800/month. For big tickets, routing payment off the online card rails (POS, bank transfer, SADAD) saves thousands. High-value invoicing does not belong on e-commerce card rates.
That third example is the highest-leverage insight on this page: the online gateway is the right tool for volume commerce, and the wrong tool for large invoices. Build both paths.
Which gateway fits which business: the decision rules
- • Saudi-only SME that wants a number it can verify → Moyasar: the only full public rate card in the market.
- • Growing merchant past a few hundred transactions a month → HyperPay: fastest settlement (T+1–T+2) and volume-negotiable rates.
- • Selling across the GCC under one contract → Tap Payments.
- • Invoice-led business billing by payment link → MyFatoorah.
- • High-volume custom build with an engineering team → Checkout.com on interchange++ pricing.
- • Foreign-incorporated, no Saudi CR, no mada needed → Stripe, accepting the T+7 settlement and the lost mada volume.
If configuring the checkout stack around these trade-offs is not where you want to spend your weeks, that is the part our Saudi e-commerce team handles inside a store build: gateway selection, integration, 3-D Secure, and the ZATCA handoff, with the fee math done against your actual basket profile.
How to negotiate the rate down
Every rate in the table except Moyasar's published card is a starting position. Three levers move it.
Committed volume. Meaningful reductions in the Saudi market start around six-figure SAR monthly volume, and the discount deepens with commitment. If you process SAR 300,000 a month, you should not be paying rack rate anywhere.
Your payment mix. A mada-heavy merchant is cheaper for the gateway to serve. Bring your mix data to the negotiation; a 75% mada profile justifies a sharper blended quote than the default assumption.
A competing written quote. The single fastest way to move a sales-led gateway is a rival's number on paper. This is the practical value of Moyasar's public pricing even if you never sign with them: it is the benchmark every other quote must beat.
Renegotiate annually. Gateways price for inertia, and a merchant who has doubled volume since signing is subsidizing the ones who ask.
We audited the pages ranking for this query — here is what they skip
Before writing this, we fetched and measured the top-ranking pages for "payment gateway fees saudi arabia" across Google and Bing (audited 2026-07-14). The pattern: thin pages with one table, or long guides where fees are a subsection. Not one covered BNPL merchant fees, settlement float, and refund fee retention together. For each page we measured word count, fee tables, and coverage:
| Ranking page | Words | Fee tables | BNPL fees | Settlement compared | Worked examples |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dedicated fees article (SaaS review site) | ~1,100 | 1 | No | No | Partial |
| General gateway guide (real-estate blog) | ~6,500 | 1 | Named, no rates | Yes, brief | No |
| Top-5 listicle (dev agency) | ~3,200 | 0 | No | No | No |
| Merchant fee explainer (finance blog) | ~1,100 | 0 | No | Yes, brief | Yes, simple |
| Payments landscape overview (PSP blog) | ~1,800 | 0 | Named, no rates | No | No |
Measured from the live pages, July 2026. Word counts are estimates from extracted body text.
Where this guide might be biased
Ijjad is a web and e-commerce development company, not a payment processor, and we hold no referral or affiliate agreement with any gateway on this page. Still, read us with these caveats. We see the gateways through integration work: a gateway with clean APIs and good docs earns our goodwill in ways a merchant who never touches code may not care about. Our fee data leans on published rates and public market data as of May 2026; negotiated enterprise pricing is opaque by design, and a large merchant's real quote can sit well below every number here. And we have shipped more builds on Moyasar and HyperPay than on PayTabs, so our first-hand sample is uneven. Where we lack direct experience we have said so rather than filled the gap with confidence.
How Ijjad fits in (and when we don't)
We don't process payments and we don't resell gateway contracts. Where we fit: building the store around the gateway so the fee math above actually holds, mada-first checkout, Apple Pay enabled, BNPL where the category justifies its MDR, big-ticket flows routed off the card rails, and reconciliation that matches ZATCA invoices to gateway payouts. One anonymized data point from that work, under our standing NDA policy of sector and city only:
+340%
conversion rate — E-commerce, Jeddah
Checkout rebuild including payment-method mix and mada-first flow. Anonymized under NDA (sector and city only).
Written by Karam Abdalqader, founder of Ijjad, an Amman-based digital product team (Shmeisani, Amman, Jordan; +962 79 565 0502; Sun–Thu 9 AM–6 PM) building conversion-focused websites and custom e-commerce for SMEs and founders across Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the GCC, including 20+ government and enterprise digital products.
If you want the fee math run against your own basket size and payment mix before you sign anything, send us your numbers. Twenty minutes of arithmetic beats a year of paying the wrong rate. Talk to the team, or get a first project range from the free cost estimator.
FAQ: payment gateway fees in Saudi Arabia
How much does a payment gateway cost in Saudi Arabia?
Published card rates cluster at 2.5–2.9% plus about SAR 1 per transaction, with mada priced lower. Setup runs SAR 0–1,500 and monthly fees SAR 0–250 in the public market data, both often waived. All-in effective cost for a typical mada-heavy store lands near 2.8–3.2% of revenue once fixed fees and VAT are counted.
What are mada transaction fees?
In-store, mada POS acquiring is regulated at a maximum 0.80% per transaction, capped at SAR 40 (mada merchant FAQ). Online, mada flows through a SAMA-licensed gateway that sets its own price: roughly 1.5–2.5% in the public market, with Moyasar publishing around 2.5%. Online mada is your cheapest online rail, but it is not the POS cap.
Which payment gateway is cheapest in Saudi Arabia?
On published rates, Moyasar's ~2.5% mada / ~2.75% card is the benchmark. But "cheapest" depends on your mix: a mada-heavy store, a BNPL-heavy fashion brand, and a big-ticket invoicer each get a different answer, and negotiated quotes beat published rates above six-figure monthly volume. Price your own basket, not the headline.
How long does payment gateway settlement take in Saudi Arabia?
T+1 to T+5 business days depending on the gateway: HyperPay T+1–T+2, Moyasar T+1–T+3, Tap and Amazon Payment Services T+2–T+3, MyFatoorah around T+3, PayTabs up to T+5. Stripe's international flow runs about T+7. On SAR 5,000 of daily sales, the T+1 versus T+5 gap is SAR 20,000 of permanently locked working capital.
Do payment gateways in Saudi Arabia charge setup fees?
Sometimes. Public market data shows setup from SAR 0 to roughly SAR 1,500 and monthly fees from SAR 0 to roughly SAR 250, with several gateways waiving both during promotions or for committed volume. Watch for low-volume maintenance charges that activate exactly when a new store is slowest. Setup fees are the most negotiable line on the quote.
What is the merchant fee for Tabby or Tamara?
Neither publishes a rate card. Market data puts Tabby's merchant discount rate around 2.79–5.99% and Tamara's around 2.5–6%, varying by category, ticket size, and installment tenor. That is roughly double the card rails, paid in exchange for upfront settlement and installment underwriting. Negotiate the category rate before launch.
Are payment gateway fees negotiable in Saudi Arabia?
Yes, above volume thresholds. Meaningful reductions start around six-figure SAR monthly volume, and the levers are committed volume, a mada-heavy payment mix, and a competing written quote. Every rate except a published rate card is a starting position, and gateways price for inertia, so renegotiate annually as your volume grows.
Is Apple Pay more expensive than mada for merchants?
Apple Pay itself adds no merchant fee; it tokenizes the card inside the wallet, so the transaction costs whatever that card's rail costs. An Apple Pay transaction on a mada card settles at your mada rate; on a Visa, at your card rate. The issuing banks compensate Apple. There is no fee-based reason to leave Apple Pay off a Saudi checkout.
References
- SAMA via Saudi Press Agency: electronic payments at 85% of Saudi retail transactions.
- mada merchant FAQs: the regulated in-store fee cap (0.80%, SAR 40 max), from the network itself.
- mada official statistics: 8.9B+ transactions, SAR 613.9B+ value (2023).
- Apple Pay overview: no additional merchant fees to accept Apple Pay.
- ZATCA: e-invoicing rules your payment reconciliation must satisfy.
Gateway pricing moves; the fee anatomy, the settlement math, and the negotiation levers are the stable part. We re-verify this page against published rates on each review pass; the badge at the top shows the last check. Related reading: our full gateway comparison with the PAYGATE-5 scores and the small-business payment options guide for the in-store and no-website channels.
Ready to build a Saudi store where the fee math works for you?
Ijjad builds mada-first, conversion-focused e-commerce for SMEs across Saudi Arabia and the GCC — gateway selection and integration included, fee math run against your real basket profile.
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Market context: Saudi Arabia's digital economy reached 16.0% of GDP in 2024, according to the General Authority for Statistics, published December 31, 2025. This is why Ijjad treats modern websites, SEO, e-commerce, AI MVPs, and mobile experiences as business infrastructure across Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, and the GCC.
By Karam Abd Al Qader, Founder of Ijjad
