DuitNow QR Merchant Fees: Three Dials Decide Your MDR, and You Control One

Key Takeaways

• Consumers pay nothing to use DuitNow QR. The merchant discount rate is deducted from the merchant.
• There is no national DuitNow QR rate. RHB charges 0.35% on payments funded from a current, savings or e-wallet account and 0.60% on credit card, effective 26 October 2026. UOB charges 0% on account-funded payments until 31 December 2026 and 0.25% on credit card.
• Micro and small merchants are still waived by major acquirers. That waiver is a commercial commitment banks agreed to, not a regulation, which is the risk nobody prices.
• Micro means annual turnover under RM300,000 or fewer than 5 full-time staff. Small, in services, means RM300,000 to under RM3 million or 5 to under 30 staff.
• The RM0.50 fee on transfers above RM5,000 is a peer-to-peer transfer fee, not MDR. It does not apply to merchant QR payments.

A poster claiming new QR charges from 1 November 2026 went round Facebook and Threads this month. The Ministry of Finance called it false on 18 October. What is real, and got far less attention, is that RHB notified its merchants on 3 October of rates starting tomorrow.

Who actually pays the MDR on DuitNow QR?

The merchant, never the customer. PayNet’s position is that consumers pay no additional charge on DuitNow QR payments. The merchant discount rate is a percentage of each sale deducted before settlement, shared between PayNet, the acquiring bank and any third-party acquirer, and it works the same way as the MDR already charged on debit and credit cards.

The deduction happens on the merchant’s side of the transaction, so a customer scanning a code at a Bangsar café pays the menu price and the café receives slightly less than the menu price. On a RM100 sale at 0.35%, the café banks RM99.65.

That is also why the “merchants will raise prices” argument has not played out the way it was pitched in 2023. Card payments have carried MDR for decades and Malaysian retailers do not generally post two prices, one for cash and one for card. The cost sits in the margin rather than on the shelf label.

Key takeaway: If a merchant adds a surcharge for paying by DuitNow QR, that is their pricing decision rather than a PayNet charge being passed through.

How much is the DuitNow QR MDR in 2026?

It depends on your acquirer and on how the customer funded the payment. RHB charges 0.35% on current account, savings account and e-wallet funding and 0.60% on credit card funding from 26 October 2026. UOB charges nothing on account-funded payments until 31 December 2026 and 0.25% on credit card.

Rates as published by each acquirer or reported in Malaysian financial press, retrieved 25 October 2026. Blank cells are figures the acquirer has not published, not zero. The widely quoted 0.25% dates from 2023 reporting and is no longer a reliable guide to any specific acquirer’s current rate.

The 0.25% figure is the one most merchants still cite, and it has quietly stopped being true for at least one major bank. RHB’s account-funded rate is 40% higher than that number and its card rate is 140% higher.

Key takeaway: Ask your acquirer for your rate in writing, split by funding source. A single blended percentage in a sales conversation is not enough to budget from.

Which merchants do not pay MDR?

Micro and small merchants, at acquirers that have kept their waiver. Micro means annual sales turnover under RM300,000 or fewer than five full-time employees. Small, in services and other sectors, means RM300,000 to under RM3 million or 5 to under 30 employees. In manufacturing the small band runs to under RM15 million.

SME size definitions per SME Corporation Malaysia, corroborated across two sources, retrieved 25 October 2026. A business meeting either the turnover or the employee test falls into that category. Where the two tests point to different sizes, the published guidance is that the smaller category applies, which is worth confirming with your acquirer since it is the test they apply to you.

Here is the part that matters more than the thresholds. When the pandemic-era waiver ended on 1 October 2023, Bank Negara Malaysia said major banks and selected non-bank providers agreed to continue waiving merchant fees for micro and small businesses, and PayNet set aside a reserve fund to help acquirers that did. Providers holding that position covered roughly 75% of DuitNow QR-accepting businesses at the time.

Agreed to is not required to. No regulation obliges an acquirer to waive MDR for a small merchant, which means the protection is a commercial commitment that can be revised with notice, exactly as RHB revised its published rates with three weeks’ notice this month.

Key takeaway: Get your acquirer’s waiver confirmed in writing with your merchant category stated on it. A waiver you cannot evidence is one you cannot dispute if it lapses.

Why does the same sale cost different amounts?

Three variables set your rate: your size classification, which acquirer signed you up, and how the customer funded the payment. You choose the second, you can evidence the first, and you have no visibility of the third at the counter.

Call it the three-dial MDR. Two identical kopitiam on the same PJ street can pay different rates on an identical RM100 sale, because they banked with different acquirers and their customers tapped different funding sources.

The third dial is the one worth understanding, because it is the only cost in your business that a customer sets without either of you knowing. At RHB the spread between account-funded and card-funded is 0.25 percentage points. At UOB it is also 0.25 points. The merchant sees a DuitNow QR payment land either way and cannot tell at the point of sale which rate applied.

Computed in Python from RHB’s published rates of 0.35% and 0.60%, retrieved 25 October 2026. Real cost falls between the two columns according to your actual funding mix. Computed 25 October 2026.

A PJ kopitiam running RM30,000 a month through QR pays RM1,260 a year if every payment comes from savings and RM2,160 if every payment comes from a credit card. At a realistic 70/30 split it is RM1,530. The RM900 range between the extremes is not a rounding difference on a kopitiam’s margin.

Key takeaway: Ask your acquirer for a settlement report that splits volume by funding source. Without it you cannot tell whether your effective rate is 0.35% or closer to 0.60%.

Is DuitNow QR cheaper than card and online payment rails?

For in-person sales, yes, by a wide margin. At RHB’s 0.35%, DuitNow QR costs about a fifth of a published 1.8% online card rate on the same RM100 sale, and still beats a flat RM1.25 online FPX fee at that basket size.

DuitNow QR rates per RHB, retrieved 25 October 2026. Online gateway rates read from the provider’s own published pricing page, as set out in our payment gateway comparison. The comparison holds at RM100 and shifts with basket size, since flat and percentage fees cross over.

The structural reason QR is cheap is that an account-funded DuitNow QR payment moves money between two Malaysian bank accounts over domestic rails, with no card scheme interchange in the chain. Once a credit card funds the payment, scheme costs enter and the rate rises, which is why every acquirer in this article prices card funding higher.

For online checkout the arithmetic is different, because flat-fee and percentage pricing cross over at a basket value you can calculate. Our payment gateway comparison works through where that crossover sits and why a merchant with a RM25 average order is often better off on a percentage rate than a flat one.

Should you take payments on a personal QR instead?

No. It avoids MDR and creates larger problems: a personal DuitNow QR is a peer-to-peer transfer, which is a different product with different rules, no merchant settlement reporting, and business income landing in a personal account.

This is the most common workaround I see among small Malaysian traders, and it is worth separating the real fee from the imagined one. The RM0.50 charge that gets quoted applies to peer-to-peer DuitNow transfers above RM5,000, per PayNet’s own clarification. It is not the MDR and it does not apply to merchant QR payments at all. Merchants routinely cite it as a reason to avoid registering properly, which inverts the actual position.

What you give up is more expensive than 0.35%. You lose the settlement reports that let you reconcile takings, you mix business and personal funds in a way that makes bookkeeping and any future e-invoice obligations materially harder, and you forgo the dispute and fraud handling that sits behind a merchant account.

Two honest counterpoints. A hobby seller doing a handful of transactions a month genuinely does not need a merchant account, and telling them to register is overkill. And a registered micro merchant on a waived rate pays the same 0% as the personal-QR route while keeping the reporting, which is the case that actually settles this: for most small traders the correct comparison is not 0.35% against zero, it is proper merchant acceptance at zero against informal acceptance at zero.

Key takeaway: If you are already SSM-registered, there is no fee argument for using a personal QR. Register for merchant acceptance and ask for the micro waiver.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do customers pay a fee to use DuitNow QR? No. PayNet’s position is that consumers pay no additional charge for DuitNow QR payments. The merchant discount rate is deducted from the merchant’s settlement. A viral poster claiming new consumer QR charges from 1 November 2026 was declared false by the Ministry of Finance on 18 October 2026.

What is the DuitNow QR MDR rate in Malaysia? There is no single national rate. Each acquirer sets its own. RHB charges 0.35% on payments funded from current, savings or e-wallet accounts and 0.60% on credit card funding from 26 October 2026. UOB charges 0% on account-funded payments until 31 December 2026 and 0.25% on credit card. The widely repeated 0.25% figure dates from 2023.

Are small businesses exempt from DuitNow QR fees? Micro and small merchants are waived at acquirers that have kept their waiver. Micro is under RM300,000 annual turnover or fewer than 5 employees. Small in services is RM300,000 to under RM3 million or 5 to under 30 employees. The waiver is a commercial commitment banks agreed to, not a regulatory requirement.

Is there a RM0.50 charge on DuitNow QR payments above RM5,000? No. The RM0.50 fee applies to peer-to-peer DuitNow transfers above RM5,000, not to merchant QR payments. PayNet clarified this distinction publicly. Merchant payments carry MDR as a percentage instead, with no flat per-transaction fee of that kind.

Can I pass the MDR on to my customers as a surcharge? Check your merchant agreement before doing so, because acquirer terms commonly restrict surcharging and the rules differ between card and QR acceptance. Note also that you cannot identify the funding source at the counter, so a flat surcharge would overcharge account-funded customers and undercharge card-funded ones.

What happens to my rate if my business grows past the small threshold? Your acquirer reclassifies you and the waiver stops applying. For a services business the trigger is turnover reaching RM3 million or headcount reaching 30. Ask your acquirer how often they reassess merchant category and whether they give notice before a rate change, since that is the point at which a 0% cost becomes a line item.

What to do this week

Find your merchant agreement and check three things: your stated merchant category, whether the waiver is written down, and whether your rate is split by funding source.

If you bank with RHB, tomorrow’s rates apply to you unless your waiver is confirmed. If you bank anywhere else, ask what notice period applies to a rate revision, because three weeks is what the market just demonstrated.

The rest of our Business guides price Malaysian trading costs in ringgit, including what an employee costs and every SSM registration fee.