Last updated: July 2026 · Written by the Kazakhstan Tourism Guide editorial team
The first question friends ask me before a trip to Kazakhstan is rarely about the mountains or the horse meat. It’s how to pay for things. A country the size of Western Europe, with its own young currency and a mobile-payment habit most visitors have never encountered, can feel genuinely confusing before you land — so let’s fix that.
The kazakhstan currency is the tenge (KZT, symbol ₸). In mid-2026 one US dollar buys roughly 470 tenge and one euro about 533, though the rate floats daily — check the National Bank of Kazakhstan on the day. Cities are overwhelmingly cashless; carry some tenge cash for bazaars, taxis and no-ATM nature sites.
I’ve managed money on the ground here across several trips — pulling cash before mountain drives, fumbling with QR codes at market stalls, learning which exchange windows give a fair rate and which airport counters quietly rob you. Below is everything I wish someone had told me the first time, organised so you can save on fees and skip the hassle. If you’re still costing out the whole journey, pair this with our guide to how much a trip to Kazakhstan costs.
Kazakhstan money at a glance
| Detail | What to know |
|---|---|
| Currency | Kazakhstani tenge, introduced November 1993, run by the National Bank of Kazakhstan; free-floating with no currency controls |
| Symbol & code | ₸ (written after the number) · ISO code KZT |
| Rough rate (mid-2026) | ~470–471 ₸ = 1 USD · ~533 ₸ = 1 EUR — floats daily, so check the National Bank rate on the day |
| Cards | Visa and Mastercard accepted almost everywhere in cities; contactless is the norm; American Express rarely works |
| Cash needed for | Bazaars, small cafés, street taxis, rural stays and nature sites with no ATM (Charyn, Kolsai, Big Almaty Lake) |
| Kaspi for tourists | Kaspi QR is everywhere but the app needs a local bank account; short-trip visitors generally can’t sign up — use the Alipay+ workaround instead |
| ATMs | Plentiful in cities (Halyk and Kaspi most reliable for foreign cards); always choose “charge in tenge,” not the machine’s conversion |
The tenge, in plain terms
The money in your pocket will be the Kazakhstani tenge. You’ll see it written as KZT in banking apps and on exchange boards, and as the symbol ₸ on price tags — a capital T with two crossbars, placed after the number the way locals write it, so a coffee shows as “990 ₸” rather than “₸990.” Get used to that ordering; it makes reading menus and receipts much faster.
The tenge is a young currency. It launched in November 1993, a couple of years after independence, replacing the Soviet ruble. The National Bank of Kazakhstan issues and manages it, and it’s a free-floating currency with no exchange controls — you can bring money in, change it, and take it out without the paperwork some neighbouring countries demand.
There’s an important consequence of that openness: there is no black market. If someone on the street offers you a “better rate,” walk away. You’ll get a fair, legal rate at any licensed exchange window, and a street offer is either a con or a stack of counterfeit notes. I’ve never once needed to change money anywhere but a proper obmennik or bank.
On paper the tenge divides into 100 tiyin, but you can forget those entirely. Tiyin coins disappeared from circulation long ago, and nothing you buy will ever be priced in them. The smallest money you’ll actually handle is the 100-tenge coin, and even that mostly turns up as change.
Kazakhstan’s exchange rate right now
As I write in mid-2026, one US dollar is worth roughly 470 to 471 tenge, and one euro around 533 tenge. Through 2026 the dollar has hovered broadly in the 460s to 480s — enough movement to notice over a long trip, but not the kind of wild swing that should change your plans.
Because the tenge floats freely, the number moves a little every day. Do not trust the figure printed in an old guidebook or the first result in a search engine, which is often stale. Before you change a meaningful sum, glance at the National Bank of Kazakhstan’s published rate for that day — it’s the reference every honest exchange office and bank uses, and it tells you instantly whether a counter is offering you a fair deal or shaving off a chunk.
A quick mental shortcut I use: at roughly 470 to the dollar, a 1,000-tenge note is a little over two US dollars, a 5,000-tenge note is around ten or eleven dollars, and the big 20,000-tenge note is roughly forty-two. Fix those anchors in your head and you’ll stop doing panicked arithmetic at the till.
Cash versus card: how people actually pay
Here’s the thing that surprises almost everyone: Kazakhstan’s cities are more cashless than most of Western Europe. In Almaty and Astana — the capital, renamed from Nur-Sultan back to Astana in September 2022 after a three-year stint under the former name — the overwhelming majority of payments happen by card or phone. Visa and Mastercard work in restaurants, supermarkets, museums, pharmacies, cinemas and most shops, and contactless “tap” is completely standard. Locals will tell you well over ninety percent of city spending is now cashless.
American Express is the exception. Amex is rarely accepted, so don’t rely on it as your only card. Bring a Visa or Mastercard as your workhorse and treat Amex as a backup at best.
So why carry cash at all? Because the moment you step slightly off the modern grid, tenge notes are king again. You’ll want cash for bazaars and market stalls, small family cafés, street taxis, rural guesthouses, entrance fees at some parks, and — crucially — the nature sites that draw people to Kazakhstan in the first place. Charyn Canyon, the Kolsai Lakes and Big Almaty Lake have no ATMs, and neither do most of the villages you pass on the way. Withdraw enough tenge in the city before you drive out, because there is genuinely nowhere to top up once you’re in the mountains.
My rule of thumb is to keep a modest float of tenge — enough for a day or two of taxis, snacks and market shopping — and put everything else on a card. That way I’m never stuck at a cash-only samsa stall, but I’m also not walking around with a brick of notes. If you’re planning day trips out of the city, read our guide to getting around Kazakhstan alongside this, because transport is where the cash-versus-card question bites hardest.
Kaspi.kz: the app that quietly runs Kazakhstan
You cannot understand money in Kazakhstan without understanding Kaspi. Kaspi.kz is the country’s dominant super-app — part bank, part payment system, part marketplace, part bill-payer — and its reach is genuinely hard to overstate. Kaspi QR, the app’s scan-to-pay feature, handles a huge share of everyday transactions; locals will casually tell you it’s around eighty percent of what they buy. Walk into almost any shop, café or market stall and you’ll spot a small Kaspi QR sticker by the till, sometimes propped up right next to the cash box.
The way it works for locals is almost frictionless: open the app, scan the merchant’s QR code, type the amount, confirm, done. No card, no cash, no terminal. It’s the reason a fruit seller at the bazaar can take a digital payment as easily as a department store, and it’s why cash has faded so fast here.
Can tourists actually use Kaspi?
This is the question I get most, and the honest answer is: generally not, at least not on a short trip. Kaspi is built on a Kazakh bank account, and opening one requires a local IIN (the individual tax number, now issued in person), a Kazakh phone number, and proof that you’re legally staying in the country. Remote onboarding for non-residents was shut off by 2026, so there’s no quick app-based sign-up from abroad anymore.
What that means in practice: Kaspi is realistic if you’re settling in for a longer stay — a student, a remote worker on a longer visa, someone with a reason to get an IIN and a local SIM and go into a branch in person. For a two-week holiday, chasing a Kaspi account is not worth your time. Don’t let anyone convince you it’s a quick fix; it isn’t.
The Alipay+ workaround (the good news)
Here’s the genuinely useful development, and it’s recent. Since August 2025, foreign visitors have been able to pay at Kaspi QR merchants using several Alipay+-linked wallets and bank apps from their own countries. Kazakhstan was the first country in Central Asia to accept Alipay+, and it plugs a real gap: if your home wallet is part of the Alipay+ network, you can scan those same ubiquitous Kaspi QR codes without a Kazakh account at all.
Whether this helps you depends on where you’re from and which app you already use, since Alipay+ connects a rotating list of partner wallets across Asia, the Middle East and beyond. Check before you fly whether your everyday payment app is in the network. If it is, you’ve effectively unlocked the local QR economy. If it isn’t, no drama — you simply lean on the two methods that work for everyone.
What to use instead if Kaspi’s out
For the vast majority of visitors, the winning combination is dead simple: a contactless Visa or Mastercard for anywhere with a terminal or a card reader, and tenge cash for everywhere that’s QR-or-cash only. That covers essentially every situation you’ll meet. I’ve travelled the country for weeks at a time on exactly that setup and never felt locked out of anything that mattered.
Fintech travel cards shine here. A Wise or Revolut card gives you near-interbank exchange rates, low or no foreign-transaction fees, and instant spending notifications — ideal in a card-first country like this one. I keep one as my primary spending card and a regular bank card as backup, held separately in case one is lost or blocked.
Using ATMs in Kazakhstan
Cash machines are everywhere in the cities — you’ll see Kaspi, Halyk, ForteBank, Bank CenterCredit and others on practically every commercial street and inside every mall. For foreign cards, I’ve found Halyk and Kaspi machines the most reliable; they rarely reject international cards and their menus switch cleanly between Kazakh, Russian and English.
The single most important habit at any Kazakh ATM: always decline the machine’s offer to convert the amount into your home currency. This trick is called dynamic currency conversion, and it bakes in a lousy exchange rate that costs you real money. When the screen asks whether you want to be charged in dollars (or euros, or pounds) or in tenge, always choose tenge. Let your own bank do the conversion — it will almost always be far better than the terminal’s.
A few more practical notes from experience. Per-transaction withdrawal limits are often around 100,000 tenge, so if you need a large sum you may have to run two withdrawals. Some Kazakh bank ATMs charge no access fee of their own, which is a nice bonus, but remember your home bank’s foreign-exchange or withdrawal fee still applies unless you’re using a fee-free travel card. And a couple of terminals only accept four-digit PINs, so if your card has a longer PIN, sort that out before you travel.
Two safety habits worth building in. First, tell your bank you’re going to Kazakhstan before you leave — transactions here get flagged as unusual by a lot of fraud systems, and there’s nothing more annoying than a card frozen on day one. Second, use ATMs inside bank branches or busy malls rather than lonely street-corner machines; it’s safer and, if something goes wrong mid-transaction, there’s staff a few steps away.
Where to exchange cash
If you’re bringing foreign cash to change, the workhorse is the licensed exchange office — look for signs reading “обмен валют” or simply “obmen.” They sit on most city blocks, often several to a street, and the competition keeps rates keen. Banks will also change money, though usually with a little more queueing. Both display their buy and sell rates on a board out front, so you can compare in seconds against the National Bank figure you checked that morning.
The place to avoid is the airport exchange counter. Arrival-hall rates are reliably poor, trading on the fact that you’ve just landed and want cash in hand. Change only the bare minimum you need to reach the city — a taxi and a meal — and do the rest at a proper obmennik downtown.
One detail that trips people up: the condition of your notes matters enormously. Bring clean, crisp, undamaged bills. Torn, scribbled-on, heavily creased or older-series notes get refused or heavily discounted. Larger denominations get the best rates too — $50 and $100 bills beat a wad of small notes. Stick to US dollars or euros as your source currency; those are what every window wants.
And to be completely clear: you cannot pay for things directly in dollars. Shops, restaurants and taxis price and settle in tenge only. Treat any foreign cash you carry purely as an emergency reserve to be converted — I keep around $200 to $400 in clean USD tucked away as a just-in-case backstop, and in practice I rarely break into it, because cards and ATMs cover almost everything.
Notes, coins and spotting fakes
Kazakh banknotes come in 200, 500, 1,000, 2,000, 5,000, 10,000 and 20,000 tenge. The 20,000 is the highest denomination, and it’s a lot of money — well over forty dollars — so it can be awkward to break in a small café. When you withdraw from an ATM, you’ll often get a mix, but try to keep some mid-size notes (1,000s and 2,000s) for small purchases and taxis.
Coins in daily use are essentially the 100 and the 200 tenge. Here’s a quirk that confuses newcomers: the 200 tenge exists as both an older banknote and a current coin, so don’t be surprised to receive either. Both are legal and spend the same. Anything smaller in coin form you can more or less ignore for budgeting purposes.
Counterfeit risk in normal shops and banks is low, and the modern notes have solid security features — colour-shifting ink, watermarks, a security thread. Where I’d stay alert is with cash handed to you outside the banking system: a street “money changer,” an over-friendly stranger, or dodgy change in a chaotic market. The fix is simple. Only ever get your tenge from ATMs, banks or licensed exchange offices, and count your change before you walk away from any stall. Do that and the counterfeit question basically evaporates.
Tipping in Kazakhstan
Tipping is light and uncomplicated here. At sit-down restaurants, around ten percent is a generous and appreciated tip — but check the bill first, because many places already add a service charge of roughly that amount, in which case you needn’t add more. For taxis, people simply round up to a convenient number rather than calculating a percentage. A small note is a kind gesture for a hotel porter or a helpful guide. Nobody will chase you down or sulk over a tip; it’s a bonus for good service, not an obligation.
Money scams and staying safe
Kazakhstan is a comfortable, low-drama country for travellers, and serious money scams are not a big feature of a trip here — for the broader picture, see our take on whether Kazakhstan is safe. That said, a few small, avoidable annoyances are worth knowing.
The classic one is the street taxi. Flag down an unmarked car and you’re likely to be quoted a tourist price two or three times the going rate, with no meter to argue against. The clean solution is to use the ride-hailing apps everyone here uses: Yandex Go and inDrive. They show a fair, upfront fare, remove the haggling, and mean you’re never fishing for cash in a stranger’s car. I use them constantly and it’s transformed how easy it is to get around.
Beyond that, the standard sensible habits apply: count your change at bazaars, where fast-moving stalls can shortchange you by accident or otherwise; use ATMs inside bank branches rather than isolated machines; and don’t flash a thick roll of notes. There’s no elaborate currency con to fall for as long as you get all your tenge through legitimate channels and skip anyone offering to change money informally.
How much money do you need?
Costs here are gentle by Western standards, which is a big part of the appeal. What you spend depends almost entirely on your style of travel. The table below gives realistic daily benchmarks in US dollars, excluding big-ticket international flights.
| Travel style | Rough daily budget | What it looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Backpacker | ~$20–40 / day | Hostel dorms and guesthouses, bazaar and café meals, shared transport and marshrutkas |
| Mid-range | ~$50–80 / day | Comfortable hotels or good apartments, restaurant meals, the odd private driver or tour |
| Comfort | ~$100–150+ / day | Upper-tier hotels, private guides and drivers, flights between distant cities, fine dining |
If you’re travelling lean, our guide to backpacking Kazakhstan breaks down how to stretch that lower band, and eating well is easy on any budget — a plate of plov or a bowl of laghman at a local canteen costs just a few dollars, as our rundown of Kazakh food shows. Accommodation is usually your biggest single line item, so it’s worth planning where you’ll base yourself; our guide to where to stay in Kazakhstan covers the trade-offs city by city.
Whatever your bracket, the money mechanics are the same: put the bulk of your spending on a low-fee card, pull a sensible cushion of tenge cash before any trip into the countryside, and keep a small stash of clean dollars in reserve. Get that rhythm going in your first day and the rest of the trip runs itself.
Staying connected so your apps work
One last piece that quietly underpins everything above: your phone needs data. Yandex Go, inDrive, your banking app, the Alipay+ wallet, maps, translation — all of it depends on being online the moment you land, not just when you find Wi-Fi. Roaming from home can be brutally expensive, so sort out local data instead.
The easiest option is an eSIM you buy and activate before you fly, so you step off the plane already connected; these typically run somewhere around two to ten dollars depending on the data allowance. Alternatively, a physical local SIM from a Kazakh operator is cheap and sold widely once you arrive (bring your passport — registration is required). Either way, getting online early is what makes the taxi apps, maps and payment tools actually usable, and it’s a tiny cost for a huge amount of convenience.
Frequently asked questions
What is the currency in Kazakhstan?
The currency is the Kazakhstani tenge, ISO code KZT, symbol ₸. It was introduced in November 1993 and is managed by the National Bank of Kazakhstan. It’s a free-floating currency with no exchange controls and no black market, so you only ever change money at licensed offices, banks or ATMs — never on the street.
Can you use US dollars in Kazakhstan?
No — you can’t spend dollars directly. Shops, restaurants and taxis price and take payment in tenge only. Dollars are useful purely as cash to exchange, and they get the best rates when they’re clean, crisp $50 or $100 bills. I’d carry around $200–400 in good-condition USD as an emergency reserve and rely on cards and ATMs for day-to-day spending.
Can tourists use Kaspi in Kazakhstan?
Generally not on a short trip. Kaspi requires a Kazakh bank account, which needs a local IIN tax number (now issued in person), a Kazakh phone number and proof of legal stay, and remote sign-up for non-residents was closed off by 2026. The workaround, live since August 2025, is that visitors can pay at Kaspi QR merchants using Alipay+-linked wallets from home — otherwise use contactless Visa/Mastercard and cash.
Where should I exchange money in Kazakhstan?
Use a licensed exchange office (look for “обмен валют”) or a bank — they’re on most city blocks and their rates are competitive and openly posted. Avoid airport counters, which give poor rates; change only what you need to reach the city there. Bring clean, undamaged USD or EUR, ideally in large denominations, and compare the board rate against the National Bank’s figure for the day.
What is the ATM withdrawal limit in Kazakhstan?
Per-transaction limits are often around 100,000 tenge, so for larger sums you may need to withdraw twice. Halyk and Kaspi ATMs are the most reliable for foreign cards, with English-language menus. Always choose to be charged in tenge, not your home currency, to dodge the machine’s poor conversion rate — and remember your own bank’s foreign-transaction fee may still apply.
Are credit cards accepted in Kazakhstan?
Yes, widely. In Almaty, Astana and other cities, Visa and Mastercard are accepted almost everywhere and contactless payment is the norm — well over ninety percent of city spending is cashless. American Express, however, is rarely accepted, so don’t make it your only card. Keep some tenge cash for bazaars, small cafés, street taxis and nature sites that have no card facilities.
How much cash should I bring to Kazakhstan?
Less than you might think, because cities are so card-friendly. I keep only a day or two’s worth of tenge on me at any time and top up from ATMs as needed, withdrawing a larger cushion before heading to ATM-free spots like Charyn Canyon or the Kolsai Lakes. As backup, carry roughly $200–400 in clean US dollars to exchange in an emergency — but expect to spend most of your trip tapping a card.
Final thoughts
Money in Kazakhstan is far easier than its unfamiliarity suggests. Once you internalise the shape of it — tenge is the currency, cards cover the cities, cash covers the bazaars and the mountains, Kaspi QR runs the show but you’ll lean on Visa or Mastercard instead — the whole thing becomes second nature within a day of landing.
Do the three simple things that save the most fees and stress: use a low-cost travel card and always let it charge you in tenge, pull enough cash before you leave the city for anywhere wild, and check the National Bank rate on the day rather than trusting a stale number. Get an eSIM sorted so your apps work the moment you arrive, and you’ll spend your energy on the canyons and the food rather than fretting at the till. Have a wonderful trip.
Before you go, check the Kazakhstan visa rules and the best time to visit Kazakhstan.
Photo credits
Tenge banknote: National Bank of Kazakhstan (CC0). Green Bazaar, Almaty: sly06 (CC BY 2.0). Bazaar stalls: neiljs (CC BY 2.0). All via Wikimedia Commons.
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