QRIS Outpaces Cards in Transaction Growth: Changing Dynamics of Indonesia’s Retail Payment Landscape

Indonesia’s Quick Response Code Indonesian Standard (QRIS) has expanded rapidly, while publicly available statistics do not separately report provincial transactions for Visa and Mastercard. To avoid relying on unverifiable network-specific allocation proxies, this study compares QRIS activity with directly observed debit- and credit-card shopping statistics reported by official institutions. The analysis uses a national annual benchmark for 2021–2024, supplemented by full-year 2025 card data, comparable January–May 2025 and January–May 2026 card-shopping windows, and published QRIS statistics through mid-2026. Between 2021 and 2024, QRIS transaction value increased from Rp27.63 trillion to Rp659.94 trillion, while combined debit- and credit-card shopping value increased from Rp573.86 trillion to Rp959.65 trillion. In H1 2026, QRIS reached 12.55 billion transactions valued at Rp1.12 quadrillion, compared with 6.05 billion transactions valued at Rp579 trillion in H1 2025. Meanwhile, nominal combined card-shopping value increased by 3.8% in January–May 2026 compared with the same period in 2025, while transaction volume declined by 3.4%. The findings indicate that QRIS is expanding substantially faster in transaction frequency, while card payments remain significant in nominal value. Illustrative cross-checks for two regions, East Java and D.I. Yogyakarta, show that card-payment patterns during rapid QRIS expansion are not uniform. Overall, the evidence points to a changing composition of retail payments and coexistence between payment instruments rather than establishing causal displacement of cards by QRIS. The study’s contribution is a transparent and reproducible set of comparable indicators constructed from official aggregate statistics, together with an explicit account of what such public data can and cannot reveal about payment-instrument substitution. All rupiah values are nominal.