Since 1 October 2026, a customer who pays Rp85,000 by QRIS at a mid-sized restaurant no longer costs that restaurant anything in merchant fees. A week ago, the same payment carried a 0.7% Merchant Discount Rate (MDR). Bank Indonesia announced the change on 17 August 2026, and it has now been in force for a few days.

For most business owners the headline is simple: QRIS just got cheaper. The useful part is what sits under the headline. The saving only shows up if your merchant category is right, if your settlements actually reflect the new rate, and if your books can tell the difference between a payment that arrived in full and one that did not.

What actually changed

MDR is the fee a merchant pays the payment provider each time a customer pays by QRIS. It is the merchant's cost, and it may not be passed on to the customer as a surcharge.

Under the expanded policy, as reported by periskop.id and set out by ShopeePay, the rules from 1 October 2026 look like this:

  • Micro merchants (UMI): 0% MDR on transactions up to Rp500,000, unchanged from before. Above that, 0.3%.
  • Small, medium and large merchants: 0% MDR on transactions up to Rp100,000. This is the new part. Above Rp100,000, the 0.7% rate still applies.

In other words, the change matters most for businesses that are not classed as micro but take many small payments: cafés, restaurants, minimarkets, pharmacies, clinics, laundries, parking operators. Previously every one of those small tickets carried 0.7%. Now the ones up to Rp100,000 carry nothing.

Comparison of QRIS MDR from 1 October 2026: micro merchants pay 0% up to Rp500,000 and 0.3% above it, while small, medium and large merchants now pay 0% up to Rp100,000 and 0.7% above it

According to Stabilitas, Bank Indonesia expects the policy to lower transaction costs for businesses, widen the benefits of the digital economy and support household purchasing power.

Why this reaches almost every business

QRIS is no longer a side channel. Bank Indonesia data cited by ANTARA on 3 October 2026 shows 12.55 billion QRIS transactions in the first half of 2026. As of June 2026 there were 44.86 million QRIS merchants, and 96.68% of them were micro, small and medium enterprises. In August 2026 alone, QRIS volume grew 67.22% year on year.

Three QRIS figures for 2026: 12.55 billion transactions in the first half, 44.86 million merchants as of June, and 96.68 percent of merchants are MSMEs

When a payment method is this widespread, a fee change is not a footnote. It touches the cash flow of a very large share of businesses at the same time, and it also touches every system that records those payments.

Four things worth checking this week

1. Confirm your merchant category. The free threshold depends on whether your payment provider has you registered as micro (UMI) or not. A micro merchant enjoys a Rp500,000 threshold; everyone else gets Rp100,000. If your business has grown since you first registered, or if you are not sure which category you were placed in, ask your provider directly. Being in the wrong category is the easiest way to pay fees you no longer need to pay, or to plan around a threshold that does not apply to you.

2. Read your October settlements. The first settlement statements under the new rules are already arriving. Pick a few days and check that QRIS payments at or below your threshold landed in your account without any deduction, and that payments above it carry the rate you expect. Do not assume. Check the actual lines.

3. Do not add a surcharge. MDR is the merchant's cost. Asking customers to pay extra for using QRIS is not allowed, and with small payments now free for every category, there is even less reason to try.

4. Record the remaining fees as their own line. Transactions above the threshold still carry MDR. If your books only record the net amount that reached your account, those fees disappear into a vague gap between sales and receipts. Book them separately so you can see what QRIS still costs you each month.

Four steps to check this week: confirm your merchant category, read October settlements, never add a surcharge, and record remaining fees as a separate expense line

The real work is reconciliation

A fee change like this exposes a question many businesses never answer properly: does every QRIS payment recorded at the cashier actually arrive, in full, in the bank account?

With a single flat rate, a rough comparison between daily sales and daily deposits was often good enough. Now there are two treatments in the same day. Small payments should arrive whole. Larger ones should arrive minus a fee. A daily total cannot tell you whether that split was applied correctly, and it cannot show you a single payment that never settled.

That is what daily reconciliation is for. The loop is not complicated, but it has to happen every business day, before the books close:

Daily reconciliation loop: sales recorded at the cashier or POS, settlement arrives from the provider, each sale is matched to each payout line, the fee is checked against the threshold, and gaps are flagged

For a single outlet with modest volume, a well kept spreadsheet can carry this. Once you have several outlets, several payment providers, or hundreds of QRIS payments a day, matching line by line by hand becomes the job nobody has time for. That is usually the point where the cashier system, the settlement data and the accounting records need to talk to each other directly, so that gaps surface on their own instead of at month end.

The takeaway

The expanded 0% MDR is a genuine saving, especially for non-micro businesses with many small transactions. But a saving you cannot verify is only an assumption. Confirm your category, read the October settlements, keep surcharges off the counter, and make sure your records can show, payment by payment, that what you sold is what you received.

If you want to talk through how QRIS payments flow from your cashier into your books, and where they could be matched automatically, reach us at bisnis@xetup.id or on WhatsApp at +62 823 1499 5005. More about what we build is on xetup.id.