Paying in Cambodia: riel, dollars, KHQR and what shops actually take

If you read one paragraph before you land: Cambodia quotes prices in US dollars, gives change in riel, and accepts one national QR standard called KHQR nearly everywhere — market stalls, tuk-tuks, pharmacies, hotels. Bring clean dollar notes, let the riel collect in your pocket for small things, keep a card for hotels and malls, and check whether the payment app you already use at home can scan a Cambodian QR. For many visitors it can.

The short answer

• Prices are quoted in US dollars in most of Phnom Penh and Siem Reap, and in riel in provincial markets.
• Change below one dollar comes back in riel. Shops round at 4,000 riel to the dollar.
• KHQR is one QR code accepted by every bank and wallet in the country, and by a long list of foreign apps.
• Cards are reliable in hotels, malls and larger restaurants, and unreliable everywhere else.
• Cash on delivery is normal here, including for online orders.

Two currencies, and only one of them is printed here

Cambodia runs a dual-currency economy. The riel is the national currency, the US dollar circulates alongside it, and both are legal to spend in the same transaction — you can hand over a five dollar note for a $3.25 meal and get one dollar and 3,000 riel back. Nobody will blink. The practical rule is that dollars handle the whole numbers and riel handles everything under one dollar. There is no US coin in circulation in Cambodia, so the riel is the change. A bottle of water at 2,000 riel is fifty cents. A tuk-tuk that says "two dollars" will happily take 8,000 riel instead.

Why your change keeps coming back in riel

This is not a merchant being difficult with a foreigner. It is policy, and it has been running for years. In 2020 the National Bank of Cambodia asked commercial banks and microfinance institutions to collect $1, $2 and $5 notes and stop putting them back into circulation, as part of a long-running effort to reduce the economy's dependence on the dollar. Small dollar notes were never made illegal, and a shop may still accept the ones you brought with you. But banks and ATMs largely stopped handing them out, so the small money in everyday circulation is riel. For a visitor this means one thing: do not try to leave the country with your riel unspent, and do not refuse it as change. It is the only currency small enough to buy a coffee with.

What condition your dollars need to be in

Cambodian merchants and banks inspect dollar notes closely. A note with a tear, a pen mark, a stamp, or a heavy fold is often refused outright, and a refused note is difficult to get rid of afterwards. Take clean, flat, recent notes out of the ATM at home, check what you are given when you break a large note here, and hand a damaged note back at the counter while you are still standing there. Riel notes are not held to the same standard. A soft, worn 1,000 riel note spends perfectly well.

KHQR: one code for the entire country

The thing that genuinely surprises visitors is how completely QR payment has taken over. A fruit seller at Psar Leu in Siem Reap has a laminated QR square taped to the crate. So does the woman selling num pang from a bicycle. There is only one of these codes, and that is the point of it. KHQR is a national standard run by the National Bank of Cambodia through its Bakong payment system, and the central bank describes it as "1 QR for all" — a single code at the merchant that accepts payment from any participating bank or wallet, rather than a different code per provider. A merchant displays one square; the customer scans it with whatever app they happen to have.

If you have a Cambodian bank account

Then this is simply how you pay for things, and you already know it. Scan, check the merchant name, type the amount, confirm.

If you do not

The central bank built an app for exactly this case. The Bakong Tourists app lets a visitor top up from a foreign Visa, Mastercard or UnionPay card and then spend at KHQR merchants like anybody else. It was introduced specifically to support tourism, and the NBC's governor has presented it as part of the same programme as the country's cross-border QR links. Two things worth knowing before you rely on it: set it up on hotel wifi on your first evening rather than at a market stall with one bar of signal, and keep enough cash for the first day while you do.

If you already pay by QR at home

Check your own app before you download anything. Cambodia has spent several years connecting KHQR to other countries' payment systems, and if you are arriving from the region there is a real chance your usual app works here untouched. At the October 2024 launch of the link between Bakong and Alipay+, the Governor of the National Bank of Cambodia, Dr Serey Chea, set out the state of that network: users of more than ten international payment apps that are Alipay+ partners can scan KHQR codes to pay in Cambodia, and the corridor covers nine other countries and regions including China, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and South Korea. She also noted that cross-border projects had already launched with Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, UnionPay, South Korea and Malaysia. In plain terms: if you are coming from Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City, Vientiane, Kuala Lumpur, Seoul or most of China, try scanning a KHQR with the app you use at home. It is free to find out, and it saves you an airport exchange counter.

Cards, ATMs and the gap between them

Card acceptance in Cambodia follows a clean line. Hotels, malls, supermarkets, chain cafés and restaurants aimed at visitors take cards without any trouble. Markets, street food, tuk-tuks, most pharmacies and most small shops do not. ATMs are widely available in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap and dispense US dollars, usually in twenties and fifties, sometimes with a riel option. Expect a withdrawal fee charged by the local machine on top of whatever your own bank charges, and expect it per withdrawal rather than per amount — so take out more, less often. Machines attached to a bank branch are the safer choice over a standalone box in a corridor. Tell your bank you are travelling before you go. A card frozen at nine in the evening in Siem Reap is a genuinely bad problem, because the fallback is finding a branch tomorrow.

What to actually carry

• Clean US dollars in twenties, plus a few singles if you brought them.
• Whatever riel accumulates as change — spend it, do not hoard it.
• One card for hotels, one card kept separately as a backup.
• A payment app that can scan a QR, tested before you need it.

You do not need to exchange money before you arrive. Dollars are spendable from the moment you land, and riel arrives on its own within the first hour. If you are still planning the trip rather than packing for it, the practical side of visiting — what is worth buying here, what customs at home will take off you, and what simply is not worth carrying back — is set out separately in what to know before you buy in Cambodia.

How this works when you order from us

Everything above is the street. Our checkout is the same picture, slightly narrower. There are four ways to pay us, and they appear together at checkout.

• KHQR — the one most customers use. The code appears at checkout, you scan it with your banking app or the Bakong Tourists app, and the order confirms when the payment clears.
• ABA PayWay — card payment, for customers who would rather not use a QR.
• Bank transfer — for customers who prefer it.
• Cash on delivery — still the most common way to pay for anything ordered online in Cambodia.

What you cannot do is pay us in cash in advance from abroad, and we will never ask you to. If a message claiming to be from us ever asks for a transfer to a personal account or a wallet number sent over chat, it is not us. Where we deliver, how long it takes to each province, and which areas cash on delivery covers are set out in our delivery guide rather than repeated here, because those details change and one page should own them. When you are ready, the catalogue is at the shop, and the payment options above appear together at checkout once there is something in the basket. Nothing is charged until you confirm.

One last thing about the exchange rate

The 4,000 riel to the dollar you will see everywhere is a rounding convention, not the official rate. The National Bank of Cambodia publishes a reference rate that moves slightly, and banks use it. Shops use 4,000 because it is the number everybody can do in their head. The difference is small enough to ignore for a meal and large enough to notice on a big purchase, so for anything substantial, pay in dollars or by QR rather than counting out riel against a rounded rate. For everything else, 4,000 is the number, and it has been the number for a long time.