What does splitting this payment actually cost?

"Interest-free" is a licence condition, not a kindness

When the Saudi Central Bank wrote its rules for pay-later companies in December 2023, it defined the activity as financing that carries no term cost payable by the consumer. Read that slowly, because it is the whole reason every app in the Kingdom opens with the same promise. A licensed provider is not allowed to charge you for the time. It is not generosity and it is not a competitive advantage, whatever the home page implies.

The same rules cap a plan at twelve instalments and set a minimum capital of SAR 5 million for anyone wanting the licence. So the shape of the product you see at checkout was largely decided by a regulator, not a designer.

What the rules do not cover is a processing fee, which is a charge for the transaction rather than for the delay. That distinction is where the actual money sits, and it is also where the scholarly argument sits. Everything below is what each company publishes about itself, with the page we read and the day we read it.

The four places the money actually goes

A pay-later plan can cost you in four ways, and only one of them tends to appear in the marketing.

The first is a processing fee charged once, at purchase. Tabby publishes one for Saudi Pay in 4. Most of the rest do not publish a number at all. The second is the upfront instalment: a four-way split where the first quarter leaves your account today is not the same cash-flow event as one where nothing moves for thirty days, and the calculator above shows which is which because comparison sites almost never do.

The third is what happens when a payment fails, which differs by country in ways that surprise people who use the same app on both sides of the Gulf. The fourth is slower and harder to see: the plan sits on your credit file now, in all three of these markets, and a bank looking at your mortgage application can see it. That last one changed for UAE shoppers two months ago and has not made it into most guides yet.

Tabby

Tabby states that all its Saudi instalment plans, Pay in 4 and the longer ones, are Shariah-compliant and that the Shariah Review Bureau certified them. Its Saudi Pay in 4 carries a processing fee of 1%, capped at SAR 50. On the same page it states there is no interest and there are no late fees.

The no-late-fee part has a date on it. Tabby removed late fees on Pay in 4 in Saudi Arabia on 16 December 2023, and said in its own announcement that it did so in response to a fatwa issued by the Council of Senior Scholars. That is unusually direct for a fintech press release, and it is worth knowing that the policy was a response to something rather than a founding principle.

The UAE is a different entity with a different set of pages, and Tabby's UAE help centre describes collection charges applied when a payment is missed, alongside a note that consistently late payments will hurt your credit score and may reduce your limit. Nothing on Tabby's UAE site makes a Sharia claim at all. The certification, the 1%, the SAR 50 cap and the licence number are Saudi-market statements and we have not found UAE equivalents.

Tamara

Tamara publishes the names of its Sharia committee, which is three people: Sheikh Prof. Yousef bin Abdullah Al Shubaily as chairman, Sheikh Prof. Saad bin Turki Al-Khathlan, and Sheikh Dr. Khalid bin Mohammed Alsayari. Tamara notes that Alsayari sits on the Shari'ah Standards Committee at AAOIFI, the body that writes the accounting and auditing standards most Islamic financial institutions work to. It describes the committee as independent, says it has authority to review the company's contracts, and publishes downloadable approvals including one covering pay-later processing fees.

On fees, Tamara is precise about the short plans and vague about the long ones. Splitting in 2 or 3 carries no processing fee, it says. For 4 payments or more, the fee is shown at checkout. There is no published rate, so there is nothing for a calculator to compute, and we would rather leave that blank than invent a number for it.

One thing does not reconcile neatly. Tamara's Saudi home page currently advertises splitting a purchase into up to 24 months, while the central bank's pay-later rules cap a plan at 12 instalments. Longer consumer finance in the Kingdom runs under other licences, so there is probably an ordinary explanation. Tamara's page does not give one, and we are not going to supply it on their behalf.

Since July, the UAE writes all of this down

In Saudi Arabia this was never a secret. Tabby tells customers it shares their information with SIMAH under SAMA's rules and updates it weekly, with changes typically reflected within four days. Tamara says it shares active customer data with the bureau periodically, and lists exactly what goes across: name, ID number, date of birth, nationality, address, purchase date, remaining amount, monthly payment, plan type, overdue amount.

The UAE only closed that gap in July 2026. Al Etihad Credit Bureau, the federal credit information entity, began including Tabby and Tamara account data in UAE credit reports, covering existing customers, new ones, and relevant historical transactions. The bureau said its scoring methodology has not changed, which is a narrower statement than most coverage of the announcement suggested. The data appears in the report. What a lender does with it is up to the lender.

The practical effect is straightforward and slightly uncomfortable. A habit that used to be invisible, four splits running at once across two apps, is now something a bank can see when you apply for a car loan. If you have been treating pay-later as a cash-flow trick rather than credit, July was the month the system stopped agreeing with you.

Egypt is a different product wearing the same words

Nothing about the Gulf split translates here. Egypt runs on licensed consumer finance under Law No. 18 of 2020, supervised by the Financial Regulatory Authority, and the plans stretch far past four payments. valU advertises terms running up to 60 months. Merchants that accept valU commonly publish an administrative fee of around 5% to 6% on the purchase, which is a real cost stated by the shops rather than a rate valU publishes as a single headline number. Sympl states 0% on 3, 4 or 5 payments for baskets between EGP 2,000 and EGP 30,000.

Egyptian regulation moved twice this month. The FRA issued its first consolidated rulebook for consumer finance companies, pulling licensing, disclosure, credit assessment and debt collection requirements into one reference and restating that marketing and customer disclosures must present terms, repayment schedules, costs and fees plainly. Then, on 10 September 2026, four board decisions appeared in the Official Gazette requiring consumer finance companies to report to I-Score as events happen rather than in monthly batches, with three months to complete the electronic integration.

None of the Egyptian providers on this page publishes a Sharia position. We have not recorded one for them.

Interest-free and Sharia-certified are two different claims

Nearly every pay-later app in the Gulf says the same thing on its home page. Fewer say who checked it, and that second claim is the one you can verify yourself. Tabby hands the question to an outside firm whose business is certification. Tamara keeps it with a committee it convened, and answers the obvious objection by publishing who is on it. Neither approach is hidden, and both have people with real standing attached.

The structural point is simple enough: a certifier with no other relationship to the company has nothing riding on the answer, while a committee the company assembled does, however qualified its members. That is not a ruling on either one. It is the part a shopper can check without any training in fiqh, which is why we put it first.

Savooh reports positions and does not issue rulings. The disagreement about these processing fees is real and unresolved, and anyone who wants a ruling should ask someone qualified to give one.

The rest of the market says much less

Cashew, in the UAE, advertises splitting a purchase interest-free and shows every payment date and amount before you agree. It names no Sharia board and makes no compliance claim on its site. That is not an accusation of anything. It is a different kind of statement, and worth not confusing with the first kind.

Most of the market sits closer to Cashew than to Tabby. Saudi Arabia has dozens of finance companies licensed by the central bank, with new pay-later licences still being granted through 2026. Egypt's market runs through valU, Sympl, Souhoola, Contact and others. Where a provider does not publish a Sharia position, we have not invented one for it, and you should read the absence as an absence rather than as either answer.

Before you rely on any of this

Every figure here carries the page we read it from and the date. Fees move, and they move per market: the 1% and the SAR 50 cap are the Saudi entity's, and we have not checked them against Tabby's UAE operation. Where the tool shows a blank instead of a fee, the provider has not published a rate, and the number you see at checkout is the only one that binds.

Read the provider's own page before you commit. And if you are comparing two plans, compare the date the last instalment clears, not the size of the monthly figure. A twelve-month plan at a smaller instalment is a longer commitment on a file a bank can now read.