On 31 July 2026, Safaricom announced a round of M-Pesa tariff cuts aimed squarely at businesses, and the new rates took effect on 7 August. The headline changes are a doubling of the free threshold on Lipa na M-Pesa Buy Goods collections and a sharp reduction in what it costs to move money out of a business till. For a Kenyan ISP, almost every shilling of revenue arrives through one of these rails, so the change is worth understanding line by line rather than skimming past as a consumer story.
What actually changed
The cuts were made under the direction of the Central Bank of Kenya and its principles on the pricing of mobile money services, which push operators toward lower charges on smaller transactions. Safaricom CEO Peter Ndegwa framed the move as reducing tariffs "by up to 45 per cent for lower value transaction bands". The concrete effects for a business collecting payments:
- Buy Goods collections up to KES 500 are now free. Previously only the first KES 200 was free, with a 0.55% fee kicking in above that. Above KES 500 the 0.55% charge still applies, capped at KES 200 per transaction and paid by the merchant, not the customer.
- Moving funds from a till to an M-Pesa wallet got much cheaper on small amounts. A transfer in the KES 101 to 500 band dropped from about KES 7 to KES 4, and the KES 501 to 1,000 band from roughly KES 13 to KES 7. The first KES 100 moves for free.
- Paying a Paybill directly from a till also came down, with reductions across the lower bands and the top band, for transfers up to KES 250,000, trimmed slightly.
- Pochi la Biashara customer payments up to KES 200 are free during a 90-day promotional window running from 1 August to 31 October 2026.
Why this matters more to an ISP than to a shopkeeper
A retail merchant sees these fees on individual sales. An ISP sees them at the scale of an entire subscriber base paying every month. If you run a few hundred PPPoE accounts and a hotspot operation, the monthly Buy Goods and Paybill activity adds up to thousands of individual transactions, and the fee on each one is a direct deduction from gross revenue before you have paid for upstream bandwidth, power or staff.
Hotspot billing benefits most visibly. Daily and weekly vouchers in Kenya frequently sell for KES 20 to KES 100, and those payments now sit comfortably inside the expanded free band on Buy Goods. Prepaid, high-volume, low-ticket sales are exactly the pattern the CBK-guided pricing change was designed to relieve, and for a walk-up hotspot business that is a real improvement in unit economics.
The till-to-wallet and till-to-Paybill cuts help on the other side of the ledger. ISPs routinely sweep collections from a paybill or till into an account used to settle transit and IP bandwidth invoices, or to pay a landlord for tower space. Cheaper low-value transfers make frequent, smaller sweeps less costly, which is useful for operators managing tight cash flow rather than batching everything into one large monthly movement.
Lower fees only help if the reconciliation keeps up
A fee cut does nothing for an operator who is still matching payments to subscribers by hand. The saving is small per transaction; the cost that actually hurts a growing ISP is the hour spent every evening reading an M-Pesa statement, working out which account a payment belongs to, and manually reconnecting the customer. That work scales with subscriber numbers, and at some point it stops being a side task and becomes a job.
This is the gap XpressRADIUS is built to close. Payments coming in through M-Pesa and Kopo Kopo are matched to the right subscriber automatically, and a RADIUS session is reconnected the moment a valid payment lands, with no operator logging into a router. Accounts that lapse are suspended on schedule. Multi-currency support and a range of mobile money gateways mean the same logic applies whether an operator is billing in Kenyan shillings or elsewhere in the region.
The takeaway
Kenya's mobile money pricing is being pushed steadily in the direction of cheaper small transactions, and the August 2026 changes are a clear step. For ISPs, the benefit is concentrated in prepaid hotspot sales and frequent low-value transfers, and it compounds with volume. Capturing it fully means running collections through a billing system that reconciles and enforces automatically, so that a larger subscriber base turns into more revenue rather than more admin.
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