Can a Malaysian Merchant Charge You Extra for Paying by Card?

Most travel advice on this states a flat rule in one direction or the other, and both versions are wrong. The Malaysian position is a layered one, and knowing the layers tells you exactly who to complain to when a counter asks for an extra percentage.

The central bank does not ban surcharging; the networks do

The governing instrument is the Payment Cards Framework, reference BNM/RH/PD 029-53, issued 19 August 2022 under the Financial Services Act 2013 and the Islamic Financial Services Act 2013. Its surcharging provisions took effect on 1 January 2023.

It defines the term precisely: a surcharge is "a fee or other obligation with similar object or effect imposed by a merchant on a cardholder in addition to the purchase amount for a transaction made using a payment card."

And it is explicit about where the prohibition comes from. Paragraph 1.3 states that greater emphasis on industry accountability "acknowledges that rules on surcharging are being set and enforced by the operators of the payment card network on their participants. Notwithstanding, the Bank will continue to monitor the practice of surcharging among merchants and ensure that it is not prevalent."

So the chain runs: network rule, binding on issuers and acquirers, enforced against the merchant by its acquirer under contract. The central bank sits above the chain rather than in it, and its own earlier 2018 statement set the position out in plainer terms: retailers "are not permitted to impose surcharges for payments using debit cards" under the reform framework, and credit card surcharges are "similarly prohibited by Visa and Mastercard rules", with enforcement by the acquiring banks and consumer recourse through the cardholder's own bank or card issuer.

The practical consequence is the one worth carrying. No penalty attaches to a merchant in any central bank instrument located. The sanction is contractual — the acquirer requiring the merchant to stop, or acting on recurring non-compliance. Complaining to the bank regulator is not the route; complaining to your card issuer is.

What the framework actually obliges

Section 11 of the framework is short and specific, and it is the part a cardholder can use.

A network operator must have clear rules for its participants on surcharging and minimum-transaction-amount practices by merchants, and "shall prominently publish such rules for reference by the public." The issuer must communicate those rules to cardholders, along with their rights, the complaint mechanism, and how to obtain a status update. Operator, issuer and acquirer together must establish "an appropriate and clearly defined complaint mechanism for cardholders to lodge complaints".

Then the transparency obligation, which is unusual: the operator "shall regularly publish information on the number of surcharging and minimum transaction amount complaints received and the status of the resolution of such complaints", at minimum the aggregate number, overall resolution status, and the types of cards involved.

Where an operator does prohibit surcharging, it must ensure its participants comply, ensure acquirers give merchants flexibility to decline higher-cost cards, and — the useful limb — require merchants to disclose any exemption they have been granted to surcharge or to set a minimum. Acquirers must ensure that an exempted merchant explicitly notifies cardholders at the point of sale of both its surcharging practice and the complaint channel, must act against merchants that fail to disclose or that give false information, and must address complaints in a timely manner including explaining why an exemption was granted.

One adjacent provision matters for how merchants may steer you. An operator or acquirer may not restrict a merchant from steering a cardholder towards a particular card or network, and steering is defined to include indicating preference or offering a discount — "but excludes the act of imposing a surcharge on a payment card transaction". A cash discount is steering; a card penalty is not.

Every published charge for driving across is set out in the border crossing guide.

Debit cards are the floor

The framework grants merchants real latitude on what they accept, and then sets a minimum. Paragraph 1.3: "Merchants are given greater flexibility to choose the types of payment cards they wish to accept based on business considerations, subject to the acceptance of debit cards as a bare minimum."

For a visitor this is the single most useful sentence in the document, and it comes with a caveat. It applies to a merchant that accepts cards at all, and it is a framework obligation running through the acquirer rather than a consumer right enforceable at the till. A small coffee shop that takes only cash and QR is not caught by it.

Merchants also gained routing choice. Under a 2025 specification letter, for a domestic transaction on a co-badged debit card, "merchants shall have the absolute discretion to decide the payment card network that a transaction is to be routed or processed", with issuers and acquirers required to enable the lowest-cost routing network. The bank was careful to label this Merchant Choice Routing rather than mandated least-cost routing: "the finalised requirement does not mandate merchants to choose the lowest cost routing network".

Published stall counts and pitch fees appear in the pasar malam stall census.

Interchange ceilings, which is where the cost comes from

A surcharge is a merchant recovering its merchant discount rate, and that rate is built on interchange, which the central bank caps. The ceilings have been in force since 1 January 2023 and are reviewed every three years.

Two things follow. The gap between a domestic debit card at 0.10 per cent and a credit card at 0.60 is sixfold, which is why merchants who surcharge usually surcharge credit only, and why the bank's guidance encourages accepting lower-cost debit and mobile payments. And any surcharge much above those ceilings is not cost recovery.

One change is already live. From 1 July 2026, a network may allow an issuer an additional interchange fee of 0.10 per cent for domestic and international brand debit transactions "initiated via mobile wallet services" — defined by footnote as digital services storing payment credentials on mobile devices, naming Apple Pay, Samsung Pay and Google Pay. Credit cards and international brand prepaid cards are excluded from the add-on for now, to be considered at the next overall review, which the bank committed to initiating by the first half of 2026.

Acquirers also owe merchants disclosure: the applicable interchange rate for each card type, the applicable merchant discount rate for each card and method, the network website where rates are published, and the merchant's right not to accept selected card types. Rates may not be bundled across card types.

The nearest published price evidence appears in the nasi kandar counter decoder.

QR is free to you, and priced to the merchant

The national QR standard, DuitNow QR, was soft-launched on 17 July 2019 and is operated by Payments Network Malaysia under the central bank's interoperable credit transfer framework. It is now very large: "more than three million registered DuitNow QR touchpoints" nationwide as at end-2025, up from 2.6 million a year earlier, with 681,250 new acceptance points added in 2025 including 267,780 among micro, small and medium enterprises. The operator processed 8.44 billion digital payment transactions in 2025, an average of 260 a second at 99.995 per cent availability.

The pricing is stated plainly: "DuitNow QR payments are free for consumers." A merchant may incur a merchant discount rate, described as a percentage of the price paid by customers "subject to the rates set by the merchant acquirer", with no percentage published.

Note one measurement limit. The central bank does not break out QR in its statistics; its payment tables report only the aggregate real-time retail payments platform, footnoted as covering "DuitNow services such as DuitNow Transfer, DuitNow QR etc". That aggregate ran 5,438.581 million transactions worth RM3,638.110 billion in 2025, and 688.097 million worth RM398.762 billion in July 2026 alone. No QR-specific value figure is published anywhere.

Whose foreign app works at a Malaysian QR code

Inbound cross-border QR is live, and this is the part most visitors do not realise they can use. The operator's own description is that the service lets "international travellers to pay merchants in Malaysia using their home country's mobile banking or e-wallet apps by scanning DuitNow QR".

The operator's published list of foreign schemes accepted inbound is Alipay+, Bakong, Maybank Cambodia, Nets, Paybooc, PromptPay, QRIS, UnionPay and WeChat Pay. On charges it states: "See the full MYR amount before paying. No extra charges, no hidden costs." No transaction limit is stated in any of the six launch releases or on either product page.

The scale of the inbound channel is documented too. Cross-border QR transactions "grew 2.5 times to 29.7 million in 2025". Alipay+ alone accounted for "more than 80 percent of cross-border inbound QR payments via DuitNow" in 2024, across fifteen international apps and travellers from ten countries and regions.

Two pieces of institutional context are worth knowing before relying on any of it. The links sit inside a wider regional programme: the central banks of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand have signed a memorandum on regional payment connectivity, and Malaysia is a participant in the Bank for International Settlements' Project Nexus, whose prototype has linked the Eurosystem's, Malaysia's and Singapore's payment systems. And the India link is an agreement rather than a live service: the announcement of 12 February 2026 says Indian travellers "will be able to use their UPI-enabled apps at supported DuitNow QR touchpoints", with no launch date given.

Cash, rounding and the declaration threshold

The current banknote series, the fourth, runs RM1, RM5, RM10, RM20, RM50 and RM100, and RM100 is the highest denomination in circulation. The RM500 and RM1,000 notes were demonetised and ceased to be legal tender on 1 July 1999.

Legal tender is now defined by the Currency Act 2020 rather than the central bank Act, whose currency sections were deleted. Section 10 provides that only currency note and coin issued by the bank shall be legal tender "at its face value provided that the currency note is not defaced and the currency coin is not tampered with", up to the limits in its second schedule. That schedule sets one limit worth knowing — "currency coin shall be legal tender for the payment of any amount up to the aggregate value of twenty-five pieces of currency coin in any single payment" — and, under the heading "limitation on cash transaction", the single word "Nil."

What the Act does not do is require a merchant to accept cash. It confers legal tender status and caps coins; no cash-acceptance duty on merchants was found in it or in any other located instrument. Treat "merchants must accept cash in Malaysia" as unverified in both directions.

Rounding has applied since 1 April 2008. A cash bill ending in 1, 2, 6 or 7 sen rounds down to the nearest 5 sen; one ending in 3, 4, 8 or 9 rounds up. The rule is stated precisely: "the Rounding Mechanism only applies to the total amount of a bill and not on individual items."

At the border, a traveller carrying cash or negotiable bearer instruments exceeding the equivalent of USD 10,000 must declare it, a requirement effective 1 January 2010. The penalty is a fine of up to RM1 million, imprisonment of up to a year, or both. The customs guide names the forms: customs form 22 for Malaysian travellers and immigration form IMM 26 for foreign travellers, with the obligation falling on "every traveller or anyone arriving in or leaving Malaysia". Residents may export ringgit up to the same USD 10,000 equivalent; no separate ringgit-specific ceiling beyond that threshold is specified.

What this guide does not cover

No merchant discount rate is quoted, because none is published — the operator states only that acquirers set it. No surcharge percentage is quoted for the same reason.

Several items were sought and not found. No penalty on a merchant for surcharging exists in any central bank instrument; the framework binds issuers, acquirers and network operators, and the sanction on a merchant is contractual. No domestic trade ministry position on adding a charge at the till could be located, in English or Malay. No DuitNow QR transaction value figure is published, and no cross-border transaction limit is published for any of the six country links.

The pre-2023 interchange ceilings, superseded on 1 January 2023, could not be verified: the reform framework's landing page gives no figures and its own frequently asked questions document is served as an unreadable legacy file.

Finally, two cautions on reading this. The framework's obligations bind financial institutions, not consumers, so the entitlements described here are things a cardholder invokes through an issuer rather than asserts at a counter. And the release date of the operator's 2025 results announcement could not be pinned precisely — the reporting period, the 2025 calendar year, is unambiguous, but the publication date resolved ambiguously between two days in April 2026.