Bank Charges in Tanzania: What You Should and Should Not Be Paying (2026)

Why an hour spent on bank charges pays better than most side hustles

Bank charges are the quietest line item in a Tanzanian household budget. Nobody sends you an invoice for them. They arrive as small deductions — a few thousand shillings here for a withdrawal, a monthly maintenance charge there, a card fee once a year — and because each one is individually forgettable, most people never add them up.

Add them up and the number is rarely trivial. A person who withdraws cash four times a month, sends two transfers, carries a debit card and pays a monthly maintenance fee is paying a real annual sum for the privilege of holding their own money. That sum is often larger than the interest the same account earns.

Here is the part almost nobody knows: many of the charges people quietly accept are not permitted. The Bank of Tanzania publishes binding guidelines on what banks may and may not charge, and that document contains an explicit list of prohibited fees. If you have ever been charged for closing an account or for resetting your own card PIN, you were charged something the regulator has said should not be charged.

This guide sets out what the rules actually say, then shows you how to audit your own account against them. It pairs naturally with our guide to opening a bank account, which covers choosing the account in the first place.

The rulebook: who decides what your bank may charge

Two documents govern this, and both come from the Bank of Tanzania.

The first is the Guidelines on Fees and Charges for Banks and Financial Institutions, 2024, issued under the Bank of Tanzania (Financial Consumer Protection) Regulations, 2019. The second is the Financial Consumer Protection (Amendment) Regulations, 2025, gazetted as Government Notice No. 298 on 23 May 2025 under the Bank of Tanzania Act, Cap. 197.

Three principles from those documents matter to you as a customer.

Fees must be reasonable and affordable. That is not a slogan; it is guideline 12. In setting a price the bank must weigh the actual service and benefit provided, the customer segment, the public good and marginalised groups, the cost of alternative ways of delivering the service, and the customer's own needs and preferences. A fee that reflects none of these is not a compliant fee.

A bank cannot raise a fee, or invent a new one, on its own initiative. Under guideline 27, a bank must seek written approval from the Bank of Tanzania before revising an existing fee upward or imposing a new one, and its application must state the existing fee, the proposed fee and the justification. The 2025 amendment adds that once approved, the new fee is implemented within thirty days of publication — and that the Bank of Tanzania may simply prohibit any fee it considers necessary to prohibit in order to protect consumers.

You are entitled to know the price before you pay it. The 2025 amendment requires a provider to disclose all information relating to fees and charges before you effect any transaction, electronic or otherwise. The 2024 guidelines say the same thing for electronic transactions specifically: ATM transactions, transfers and payments must show you the charge before you confirm. A charge that only appears on the statement afterwards is a disclosure failure.

On top of that, providers must publish their interest rates, fees, charges and other related costs quarterly, within five working days, in at least one Kiswahili and one English newspaper of wide circulation and on their own website. If you cannot find your bank's tariff on its website, that is itself a red flag worth raising.

The charges your bank is not allowed to make at all

This is the section to screenshot. Guideline 20 of the 2024 Guidelines states plainly that a bank or financial institution shall not impose fees or charges on:

your one-month bank statement delivered electronically, at the first instance of each respective month;
reviewing the last 30 days of transactions through the mobile app or internet banking;
internal banking activities that do not involve a transfer of value — explicitly including adding, updating or deleting beneficiaries, updating your client profile, and resetting the PIN on the bank's own card; and
cancelling a card.

Guideline 21 goes further. Where a service is part and parcel of the bank's own internal operating processes or its own risk management — and you did not ask for it — it must not be charged. That list covers:

card replacement, with the sole exception of replacement on expiry;
reminder fees on any product, including notices about a dormant account;
dormant account activation;
domestic inward transfers — money arriving into your account from within Tanzania; and
account closure.

The 2025 amendment adds one more that catches a lot of people: accruing maintenance fees on a dormant or inactive account is listed among unfair business practices. The same amendment redefines the terms — an account is "inactive" once unused for more than five months and "dormant" at twelve months, where the old rule treated five months as dormancy. So the account you stopped using last year should not be quietly eating itself through monthly fees, and you should not be charged to wake it up again.

Two smaller but concrete rules from guideline 22: no fee on a deposit of coins up to TZS 100,000, and no fee on exchanging coins for notes, or notes for coins, up to TZS 50,000. That matters to traders and to anyone running a cash-heavy stall.

Finally, guideline 19 bans the card surcharge. A bank and its merchants shall not impose fees on the consumer for merchant payments by card. If a shop tells you that paying by card costs you an extra percentage, that shop is out of line, and the bank is required to keep a register of non-compliant merchants and act on it.

Charges that are allowed — but only within limits

Not everything is free, and the rules are just as specific about the ceilings.

On-demand services — audit confirmations, photocopying loan documents, issuing a redemption statement, retrieving old documents — may be charged, because they are not routine. But the fee must not exceed the actual cost incurred, and it must not be bundled under vague headings such as "administrative fees" or "miscellaneous costs". If a charge on your statement is labelled "admin", you are entitled to ask what specific service it bought.

Third-party costs on a loan — valuation of collateral, security registration, insurance cover, government taxes and levies — may be passed through, but guideline 13 says such charges shall not exceed the actual payments made to the third parties. Your bank is a conduit for those costs, not a margin-taker on them.

Insurance on a loan is tightly bounded by guideline 14: the bank may not charge you a premium above the actual premium charged by the insurer, and may not charge you insurance at all if the loan is not insured by a licensed insurance company. Anyone borrowing should read that alongside our guide to borrowing money safely before signing.

Early settlement or cancellation fees and late repayment penalties are permitted only where they were clearly stipulated in the loan agreement. And there is a fairness catch on the penalty: no late-payment penalty may be levied where the late repayment was caused by the bank's own negligence. If your salary landed on time and the bank's system failed to sweep it, the resulting penalty is not yours to carry.

One more from the 2025 amendment that quietly changes loan arithmetic across the market: a financial service provider shall apply a reducing balance method to calculate interest on loans. Flat-rate interest on a shrinking balance overstates what you owe, sometimes dramatically. When you compare offers on personal loans, that single sentence is your best argument in the room.

The universal savings account nobody advertises

Guideline 17 requires every bank and financial institution to offer a special individual universal saving account, aimed at bringing unbanked and low-income earners into the banking system. Its minimum features are set by the regulator, not by the bank:

it does not attract a monthly maintenance fee;
it is maintained in Tanzanian shillings; and
it is individually owned.

This product exists at your bank whether or not a branch officer volunteers it. If your needs are simple — receive money, hold it, save a little — asking for the universal savings account by name can remove your single largest recurring charge at a stroke. Compare it against the alternatives on our savings accounts and bank accounts pages before you switch, because a fee-free account that forces you into expensive withdrawals is not a saving.

Audit your own account: the twelve-month method

Rules only help if you check. Do this once and you will never guess again.

Step one — get twelve months of statements. Your monthly electronic statement is free by regulation, and providers must issue statements at least once a month. Ask for the full year.

Step two — pull every non-transaction line into a list. Anything that is not you spending, receiving, or moving your own money is a charge. Give each one a name, a frequency and an annual total.

Step three — check each against the prohibited lists above. Statement fee? Beneficiary update? PIN reset? Card cancellation? Dormancy activation? Inward domestic transfer? Account closure? Those should not be there.

Step four — do the annual arithmetic. The method matters more than any number, so use your own. If a maintenance fee is M per month, a withdrawal costs W and you withdraw n times a month, and a transfer costs T for t transfers a month, your annual cost is:

12 × (M + nW + tT) + annual card fee + one-off charges

Suppose, purely as an illustration of the arithmetic, that your own statement shows a maintenance fee, four withdrawals and two transfers each month. Twelve months of those three lines together will usually dwarf the interest a current account pays — which is precisely why the comparison is worth making rather than assuming. Run your real figures through our savings calculator to see what the same money would have become had it stayed in your account instead of leaving it.

Step five — read the levy line separately. Government levies and taxes on banking transactions are collected by the bank but set by law, not by the bank, so they are not a tariff you can negotiate. Identify them on the statement and confirm the current rate with the Tanzania Revenue Authority rather than assuming — rates in this area have changed more than once.

Step six — change your behaviour before you change your bank. Fewer, larger withdrawals beat many small ones. Card payments at a merchant should cost you nothing at all. Bank-to-wallet and wallet-to-bank movements have their own pricing, covered in our guide to reducing mobile money charges.

What to do when a charge is wrong

There is a defined process, with a clock attached, and it is worth knowing precisely because most people give up at the first counter.

Complain to the bank first. Put it in writing, name the charge, the date and the amount, and say what you want done. The 2025 amendment requires the provider to notify you of its final decision in writing.

The bank is working to a published timetable. The First Schedule to the amended Regulations sets resolution times by product. Deposits: within 8 hours. Mobile financial services: 12 hours. Domestic card payments, internet banking, cheques through TACH, inter-bank payments through TISS and instant payments through TIPS: 24 hours. Electronic transfers: 36 hours. Remittances through banks and regional payments through EAPS or SIRESS: 48 hours. Credit facilities: 14 days. International card payments: 30 days.

If you are not satisfied with the reasons given, refer the complaint to the Bank of Tanzania. That right is explicit. On receiving your complaint, the Bank directs the provider to respond within ten days, and may extend that by no more than half again on good cause. If the provider does not respond, the Bank determines the matter anyway. The Bank must deliver its written determination within sixty days of receiving the complaint.

The determination has teeth. A provider that fails to comply with the Bank's final decision is liable to a fine of TZS 1,000,000 for each day the decision goes unimplemented. Separately, failure to adhere to the fees and charges guidelines carries a penalty of up to TZS 20 million, which may be imposed on the institution's directors, officers or employees.

If you disagree with the Bank's determination, you may apply for review within seven days of receiving it, and the Bank must determine that review within twenty-one days.

One further right worth knowing, from the 2025 amendment: where you lose money through fraud, scams, misappropriation or misuse involving assets your provider holds or controls, the provider is liable and must promptly refund the actual amount lost, unless it proves the loss was caused by your own negligence or fraudulent behaviour. That sits alongside the deposit insurance that protects you if the bank itself fails — two different protections for two different problems.

Charges, credit and the bigger picture

Fees are only one side of the cost of banking. The other is what your borrowing costs, and the two interact: a bank with modest account fees and expensive credit may be worse for you than the reverse. Before you borrow anywhere, check what lenders can see about you by pulling your credit report, and be ruthless about the difference between a licensed institution and an informal one — our guide on spotting an unlicensed lender exists because the fee rules in this article bind licensed banks and financial institutions, and nobody else.

If your banking needs are mostly savings and small credit, a SACCOS is a genuinely different cost structure worth pricing alongside a bank. And whatever you choose, the charges you find should feed straight into your monthly plan — see how to budget and manage money for the mechanics.

Frequently asked questions

Can my bank charge me for a monthly statement? Not for the first electronic statement covering one month, each month. That is explicitly prohibited under guideline 20 of the 2024 Guidelines. Additional statements, historic statements or printed copies retrieved on request fall under on-demand services, which may be charged but only up to the actual cost incurred.

I was charged to close my account. Is that allowed? No. Account closure is listed in guideline 21 among the internal operating processes that must not be charged to the consumer. The same list covers card replacement other than on expiry, dormant account activation, reminder fees and domestic inward transfers.

My account went dormant and fees kept coming out. What are my rights? Accruing maintenance fees on a dormant or inactive account is named as an unfair business practice in the 2025 amendment, and reactivating a dormant account must not be charged. Under the amended definitions an account is inactive after more than five months unused and dormant at twelve months. Raise it with the bank in writing and escalate to the Bank of Tanzania if the answer does not satisfy you.

A shop wants to add a percentage for paying by card. Must I pay it? No. Guideline 19 says a bank and its merchants shall not impose fees or charges on the consumer for merchant payments by card, and requires banks to sanction merchants who surcharge and to record them in a central registry. Pay the ticket price or pay another way.

How do I know if my bank has raised a fee legitimately? It must have prior written approval from the Bank of Tanzania before revising a fee upward or introducing a new one, and it must publish its rates, fees and charges quarterly, within five working days, in a Kiswahili and an English newspaper of wide circulation and on its own website. Check the published tariff against your statement.

Which language does my loan agreement have to be in? English or Kiswahili, based on your preference. The 2025 amendment also bars unclear technical terminology, and where a technical term has no plain substitute, the provider must explain it to you clearly.

Does any of this apply to mobile money? The Financial Consumer Protection Regulations apply to financial service providers licensed, supervised and regulated by the Bank of Tanzania, and the complaint timetable sets a 12-hour resolution window specifically for mobile financial services. Pricing structures differ, though — start with our guides to sending and receiving money and reducing mobile money charges.

Reviewed 2 August 2026. Regulatory positions in this guide come from the Bank of Tanzania Guidelines on Fees and Charges for Banks and Financial Institutions, 2024 and the Bank of Tanzania (Financial Consumer Protection) (Amendment) Regulations, 2025 (GN No. 298 of 23 May 2025). Individual bank tariffs change with Bank of Tanzania approval — always check your own bank's published tariff before acting.

This article is general information, not financial advice.