How to buy Bitcoin in Saudi Arabia

You can buy Bitcoin from Saudi Arabia in about fifteen minutes, and there are exactly three ways to do it: pay with a Saudi Visa, Mastercard or Apple Pay in US dollars on CEX.IO; pay another person in riyals through STC Pay, urpay or a bank transfer on a P2PP2PPeer-to-peer: you buy from another user and pay them directly in riyals, while the exchange holds the Bitcoin in escrow until the seller confirms your payment. market such as Binance or Bybit; or send a riyal bank transfer to a Gulf-licensed exchange such as CoinMENA. This page walks through each one step by step, with the fees as the platforms publish them. It is not a comparison of exchanges (that is here) and it is not a general overview of crypto (that is the home page). It is the Bitcoin page.

One sentence on the law before the steps: buying Bitcoin is not prohibited for individuals in the Kingdom, but it is unregulated, no exchange holds a Saudi licence, and the 2018 Standing Committee statement from the CMA, SAMA and other bodies still warns that virtual currencies are not approved. Everything below happens at your own risk, with no Saudi investor protection.

What Bitcoin is, in two paragraphs

Bitcoin is a digital asset that nobody issues and nobody can print more of. A public ledger, the blockchain, records every transfer since 2009, and a network of computers called miners confirms new transactions in exchange for newly created coins. The total supply is capped at 21 million, and the amount paid to miners is cut in half roughly every four years in an event called the halvingHalvingBitcoin's scheduled cut in the number of new coins created per block, roughly every four years; it slows the growth of supply towards the 21 million cap.. Those two rules, a hard cap and a shrinking issuance, are the whole reason people compare it to gold rather than to a currency.

You do not need to buy a whole coin. One Bitcoin divides into 100 million units called satoshis, so a purchase of SAR 500 simply buys a fraction. In Saudi Arabia Bitcoin is held far more than it is spent: there are no verified Bitcoin ATMs in the Kingdom, pilgrim payments and shops run on riyals, and the people buying it are mostly saving in it. It is also, by a distance, the most searched coin name in Arabic, and the one the 2018 statement names explicitly. For the broader list of what Saudis buy, see our top cryptocurrencies ranking.

Three routes from Saudi Arabia

Every Saudi purchase of Bitcoin runs into the same wall: SAMA-supervised banks and payment apps do not offer crypto services, so there is no "deposit riyals, buy Bitcoin" button anywhere. The three routes are three ways around that wall. The card route trades riyals for dollars at your bank and dollars for Bitcoin at the exchange. The P2P route keeps everything in riyals by paying a private seller. The licensed-Gulf route sends a riyal bank transfer to a company regulated in Bahrain or Dubai. Pick by how much you are buying and how much set-up you will tolerate.

Route 1: card or Apple Pay on CEX.IO

This is the route most beginners in Riyadh or Jeddah take, because it needs nothing but a card and a passport or national ID. CEX.IO has operated since 2013; Saudi users are served by the group company CEX OVRS LLC in Nevis, while the FinCEN registration (NMLS 1804170) and the FCA cryptoasset registration (1007192) belong to its US and UK sister companies. Saudi Arabia is not on its list of thirty unsupported countries. It does not accept riyals: the card is charged in US dollars and your bank converts.

1. Create the account and switch on 2FA

   Register with an email you will keep for years, then enable two-factor authentication before you do anything else. Account recovery and withdrawal confirmations run through these.

2. Verify your identity

   Upload a passport or national ID and take the selfie check. CEX.IO says the accepted documents depend on your country of residence; whether an Iqama alone is enough is not documented, so expats should use the passport.

3. Open Buy Bitcoin and enter an amount in USD

   Minimum 20 USD. Identity-verified users can buy up to 3,000 USD per transaction; if your verification is less than three months old, cards are capped at 1,000 USD per day and 3,000 USD per month.

4. Pay with a Saudi Visa, Mastercard or Apple Pay

   The card must be in your own name. If a mada-branded debit card is declined, try Apple Pay with the same card or a credit card; test reports say those authorise more reliably. A small verification charge may appear and be reversed.

5. Check the confirmation screen, then confirm

   The exact service commission for your order is shown before you tap buy. That number, not any figure on a comparison site, is your real fee. The Bitcoin appears in your CEX.IO balance within minutes.

Route 2: riyals via P2P on Binance or Bybit

On a P2P market the exchange is a referee, not a seller. You pick an advertisement from a verified seller, the exchange locks the seller's coins in escrowEscrowCoins held by the platform until the buyer's payment is confirmed; the seller cannot take them back and the buyer cannot receive them until the payment is verified., you transfer riyals to the seller through your bank app, STC Pay or urpay, and the coins are released when the seller confirms. Binance runs the deepest SAR market and officially added urpay and Liv. KSA as payment methods in April 2022; STC Pay and bank transfers appear as methods in test reports. Bybit also runs a SAR P2P market and offers an Islamic Account (spot only, certified by ZICO Shariah since September 2024).

Most SAR P2P liquidity sits in USDT, not Bitcoin. The Bitcoin tab exists on Binance P2P, but the practical path for many buyers is two steps: buy USDT with riyals, then convert USDT to BTC on the spot market. Our P2P guide covers the ad filters and the scam checks in depth; the short version follows.

1. Verify the exchange account

   Binance asks for ID and proof of address; test reports say Bybit accepts a Saudi National ID or Iqama with a selfie. P2P is closed to unverified accounts.

2. Open P2P, set fiat to SAR and choose BTC or USDT

   Filter by your payment method (STC Pay, urpay, bank transfer). Sort by price but read the seller's completion rate and order count; a 98%+ rate with hundreds of orders is the norm for merchants.

3. Place the order and pay from your own account

   Transfer the exact riyal amount from an account in your own name. Do not write "Bitcoin", "crypto" or "USDT" in the transfer note; leave it blank or use the order number if the seller asks.

4. Mark as paid and wait for release

   The seller confirms receipt and the exchange releases the coins from escrow. Binance charges a flat 0.05 USDT taker fee per order on USDT pairs in the SAR market. If the seller stalls, open a dispute inside the platform; never cancel after paying.

5. Convert USDT to BTC if you bought USDT

   On the spot market, buy BTC with USDT using a market or limit order. The amount of Bitcoin you receive is the riyal amount divided by the live SAR price, minus the seller's premium and the spot fee.

Route 3: bank transfer to a licensed Gulf exchange

If you would rather deal with a company that answers to a regulator, even a non-Saudi one, CoinMENA is the platform that publishes riyal prices. It holds a Central Bank of Bahrain category-3 licence and a Dubai VARA licence, lists SAR as a local currency, and prints its SAR fees: bank-transfer deposit 0% with a SAR 37.5 minimum, card or Apple Pay deposit 4%, trading 0.75%, and a SAR 117.5 withdrawal fee with a SAR 500 minimum. Local transfers take one to two working days. Rain, licensed in Bahrain since 2019, lists Bitcoin and historically accepted SAR, but its own site does not document Saudi onboarding today, so confirm inside the app before relying on it. BitOasis names Saudi Arabia and SAR in its App Store listing. None of the three is licensed in Saudi Arabia.

1. Register and complete KYC

   Passport and selfie; CoinMENA accepts deposits only from a personal bank account in your own name, never from a third party or a business account.

2. Add the exchange as a beneficiary in your bank app

   Use the SAR deposit details shown in the exchange, with the reference code it gives you. Al Rajhi, SNB, Riyad Bank and Alinma all support adding a local beneficiary through SARIE.

3. Send the riyal transfer

   Minimum SAR 37.5 on CoinMENA. Expect one to two working days for a local transfer to be credited. Keep the transfer receipt.

4. Buy Bitcoin at the quoted price

   Trading fee 0.75% on CoinMENA. The price includes the exchange spread, so compare it with the live CoinGecko SAR rate before confirming large orders.

What each route costs

Because the riyal is pegged to the dollar, the "price of Bitcoin in SAR" is identical everywhere: the USD price times 3.75. What differs is the cost of getting from your riyals to that price. The calculator below applies each route's published fee and a typical spread to the amount you enter. For cards it uses the top of CEX.IO's published range plus a small spread; for P2P it uses Binance's 0.05 USDT fee and a seller premium of roughly 0.3%–1% above the peg, which is a secondary estimate, not a published figure; for the bank route it uses CoinMENA's 0% deposit and 0.75% trading fee. Your bank's foreign-transaction mark-up on card payments, usually a further 2%–3%, is the hidden line item on route one.

Two things the calculator cannot show. First, the spreadSpreadThe gap between the best buying price and the best selling price on a market; part of the cost of every trade even when the fee is zero. on a quiet P2P market can be wider than the fee, so compare three or four ads rather than taking the top one. Second, exchange withdrawal fees for Bitcoin are a fixed amount of BTC per withdrawal, set by each platform and shown on the withdrawal screen; on a SAR 300 purchase that fixed fee is a meaningful percentage, which is one argument for buying a little more, less often.

Choosing the amount, withdrawing and storing

The amount. Decide it in riyals before you open the app, and make it money whose loss would not change your month. Bitcoin has fallen by more than half several times in its history and will do so again. A common pattern among Saudi buyers is a fixed sum each month rather than one large purchase, which smooths the price you pay; CoinMENA's SAR 37.5 minimum and CEX.IO's 20 USD minimum make that easy. Think in satoshis, not whole coins: SAR 1,000 buys the same fraction of the network whether the headline price is high or low.

Withdrawing. Bitcoin left on an exchange belongs to you only as long as the exchange is solvent and your account is not frozen, and no platform serving Saudi residents answers to a Saudi regulator. Once you hold more than you would be comfortable losing to a hacked account, withdraw it. On the exchange, choose Withdraw, select BTC, paste the receiving address from your wallet, and pick the Bitcoin network (not a token version of BTC on another chain). Send a small test amount first. The on-chain fee depends on how busy the network is, and the exchange adds its own fixed withdrawal fee.

Storing. A wallet is a pair of keys, and whoever holds the seed phraseSeed phraseThe 12 or 24 words generated when you create a wallet; they recreate your keys on any device, so anyone who has them owns your coins. owns the coins. For a few hundred riyals a mobile wallet such as Trust Wallet or Exodus, both on the Saudi App Store, is fine. For larger sums use cold storageCold storageKeeping your keys on a device that never connects to the internet, such as a hardware wallet, so malware on your phone cannot reach them.: Jarir sells the Ledger Nano X at SAR 669 including VAT, and Tangem ships cards to the Kingdom. Write the seed phrase on paper, keep it where you keep your passport, and never type it into a website, a chat or a "support agent". Our wallet guide compares the options available here.

Halal viewpoints on Bitcoin

We do not issue rulings; we report who has said what. There is no official fatwa on Bitcoin from the Council of Senior Scholars. Within the Kingdom, the voices on record are cautious or prohibitive. Sheikh Abdullah Al-Manea, a member of the Council, said in June 2018 that Bitcoin is "one of the forms of usury" and takes "a very strong form of gambling", and that digital currencies fail the conditions of money. Sheikh Assim Al-Hakeem of Jeddah ruled in December 2017 that Bitcoin is not halal, citing anonymity that enables money laundering and speculation he described as pure gambling; reports that he later reversed that position trace back to an article restating it, so treat them as false.

On the permissive side, Mufti Faraz Adam of Amanah Advisors treats Bitcoin as a permissible digital asset, or māl, a view many Sharia-screening services follow. Bahrain's Shariyah Review Bureau certified Rain's brokerage and custody of Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin in 2019. Bybit's Islamic Account, certified by ZICO Shariah and CryptoHalal, allows spot trading of screened coins including Bitcoin. The conditions the permissive scholars attach are consistent: buy and hold the asset itself, not leveraged or futures contracts; take no fixed-yield "earn" products, which look like ribaRibaInterest: a guaranteed return on money lent, prohibited in Islamic finance.; and avoid ghararGhararExcessive uncertainty or gambling-like risk in a transaction., which for them rules out day-trading on hype. Where you land between Al-Manea and Faraz Adam is a question for you and a scholar you trust; our halal guide lays out both sides with sources.

Tax, Zakat and the scams that target Bitcoin buyers

Saudi Arabia has no personal income tax and no capital-gains tax for individuals, and ZATCA has published no crypto-specific guidance, so a resident who buys Bitcoin and sells it later owes no tax on the gain. The religious obligation of Zakat at 2.5% is a separate matter that scholars discuss for crypto holdings, and businesses that deal in crypto fall under the 20% corporate tax on foreign-owned profits and 15% VAT like any other business. Expats should check the rules of their home country, which may tax worldwide gains. Details in our tax and Zakat guide.

If you have read this far you know more than most first-time buyers. Choose the route, buy a small amount, withdraw it to a wallet whose seed phrase is on paper, and only then decide whether Bitcoin deserves a larger share of your savings.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and references

1. CEX.IO — Buy Bitcoin page
2. CEX.IO — Instant Buy with a debit/credit card (limits)
3. CEX.IO — card and bank-transfer fee ranges
4. CEX.IO — legal & security: group entities by region
5. Binance — P2P adds urpay and Liv. KSA for SAR (29 Apr 2022)
6. Binance — flat 0.05 USDT taker fee on USDT pairs in selected fiat markets
7. CoinMENA — fee schedule including SAR deposits and withdrawals
8. Capital Market Authority — Standing Committee statement on virtual currencies (2018)
9. Okaz — Sheikh Abdullah Al-Manea on Bitcoin (June 2018)
10. Zawya — Shariyah Review Bureau certification of Rain (2019)

Related pages

• Top coinsThe 15 most available and popular coins in the Kingdom
• Best exchanges8 platforms that serve Saudi residents, compared
• P2P tradingHow SAR P2P works and how to avoid scams
• Buy with a cardVisa, Mastercard, mada and Apple Pay
• Best walletsMobile and cold wallets that work in Saudi