Tashkent retailers face unified-QR enforcement from July 2026.
A presidential decree of December 2025 forces every Uzbek legal entity in trade and services onto a single bank-issued payment QR-code. From 1 January 2026 retailers must begin accepting it; from 1 July 2026 the absence of a working QR at the point of sale is itself a violation of trading rules. The Central Bank of Uzbekistan generates the codes and the State Tax Committee receives every payment in real time.
01The pain
Three minutes. That is what Ipak Yuli Bank promises a Tashkent café owner registering for the country's new unified payment QR: print the sticker, fix it to the counter, accept money from any Uzbek bank's app.5 A presidential decree of December 2025 makes the single QR-code mandatory for every legal entity in trade and services. From 1 January 2026 retailers must begin accepting it; from 1 July 2026 absence of a working QR at the point of sale is itself a trading-rules violation.1
The Central Bank generates the codes; the State Tax Committee receives every payment in real time. There is no privacy buffer between till and auditor. A parallel cashless-only regime begins 1 April 2026 for fuel, alcohol, tobacco, electric-vehicle charging, real estate, vehicles under ten years old, and any single transaction over UZS 25 million (about USD 2,000).2 The Chilanzar grocer and the Yunusabad hairdresser must open a compliant acquiring account, wire the QR into their online cash register, and reconcile daily against the ESF (electronic invoice system) so the customer's tax-cashback actually lands.
The same April-2026 quarter saw roughly 3,000 small businesses suspend operations after fines. The Business Ombudsman conceded the system pressures small operators most.3 The unified rail solves a real problem. It also turns every back-room cash drawer into a compliance line item.
Further reading
- 1 Gazeta.uz (Russian), 10 December 2025 — coverage of the presidential decree introducing a unified payment QR-code: Central Bank pilot from December 2025, mandatory acceptance for legal entities in trade and services from 1 January 2026, full enforcement (absence of QR at the till treated as a trading-rules violation) from 1 July 2026: gazeta.uz
- 2 Tavat.uz (Russian) — practitioner walkthrough of the parallel cashless-only regime kicking in 1 April 2026: state-service and utility payments, alcohol and tobacco, fuel and EV charging, real estate, vehicles (categories M, N, O, G under ten years old), and any single transaction over UZS 25 million: tavat.uz
- 3 Spot.uz (Russian), 14 April 2026 — report on the roughly 3,000 small enterprises that suspended operations after financial fines in the April-2026 quarter, including a public statement by Business Ombudsman Abdumannon Buriyev that the system pressures small operators most, and the presidential 50%-discount and refund-within-15-days relief measures introduced in response: spot.uz
- 4 Kun.uz (English) — companion summary confirming the 1 January 2026 / 1 July 2026 timeline, the QR-code requirement extending to self-employed and sole proprietors from January 2026, and Uzbekistan's stated policy of raising the cashless share of retail turnover to 75% by 2030: kun.uz
- 5 Ipak Yuli Bank (English) — bank-side product description of unified-QR registration for individual entrepreneurs and legal entities, advertised as a three-minute, no-fee setup that lets a merchant accept payment from the app of any participating Uzbek bank: en.ipakyulibank.uz
02Who solves this today
Five Uzbekistan-active providers whose own pages explicitly market either unified-QR / business-acquiring onboarding for merchants, a fiscal-data-operator (FDO) -connected online or virtual cash register, or a retail point-of-sale (POS) platform built for Uzbek SMBs. None has yet productised the full Tashkent-SMB stack — bank account, printed shop-window QR, online cash register, ESF reconciliation and remote-audit archive on a single monthly subscription — which is precisely the wedge in the third TL;DR bullet. Each entry was checked live on the date of writing. The list is intentionally narrow.
Listed providers publicly market to the Uzbek unified-QR / acquiring / fiscal-cash-register niche on their own pages. Inclusion is not endorsement. Adjacent vendors and platforms were considered and excluded where their public homepage or service pages did not explicitly name the niche on the date of writing — Click (click.uz) markets a consumer SuperApp and bill-payment service and the public homepage does not detail merchant unified-QR acquiring (a separate business.click.uz portal exists but its public page rendered only the brand string on probe), so it was dropped pending clearer SMB-merchant marketing copy; Payme (payme.uz) renders only a brand string on the public homepage with no SMB merchant-acquiring detail surfaced, so it was dropped; Apelsin (apelsin.uz) returned a JavaScript-loading shell on probe with no readable merchant-acquiring marketing copy, so it was dropped pending a static product page; Anor Bank (anorbank.uz) returned HTTP 403 (anti-bot wall) on probe, so it was dropped; Smartup (smartup24.com) markets a distribution-automation cloud platform with no explicit unified-QR or ESF / online-cash-register integration in its public copy, so it was dropped; Atmos (atmos.uz) markets card-based acquiring for UZCARD, HUMO, VISA and Mastercard but did not surface unified-QR acceptance specifically, so it was dropped pending updated copy. The narrowness of the list — one bank-side unified-QR onboarding, one acquiring-terminal vendor with QR support, one online cash register with FDO integration, one virtual-cash-register module talking directly to the State Tax Committee, one retail POS — is itself the structural opening: the one-tap Tashkent-SMB onboarding bundle (bank account plus printed QR plus till plus ESF reconciliation on a single monthly subscription) is not yet productised by any single Uzbek provider.
Listed companies — manage your entry. If you are one of the providers above and anything here is wrong, missing, or out of date — or you'd rather not be listed — write to us. Removal within 24 hours; corrections within 7 business days. We do not contact listed companies first; we publish what your own public marketing claims and respond when you reach out. Email contact@aikraft.com.