NBS: 7.1 Million Serbians Pay by Card, Purchases Up 19%
The National Bank of Serbia has released data for the second quarter of 2026: 237.9 million card purchases, up 19.3 percent year over year and double the figure from five years ago.
7.1 million payment card users and 237.9 million card purchases in just three months: that is the picture of the second quarter of 2026 released by the National Bank of Serbia (NBS). Behind those figures lies a trend that has now run for five years, one that has doubled the number of card payments in the country over that period.
How many cards are in circulation
According to data from payment service providers, 7.1 million users were registered for card issuing services at the end of the second quarter of 2026. The total number of cards issued reached 13.7 million, up 706,000 from a year earlier, a rise of 5.5 percent. That figure covers both individuals and companies to which cards were issued, not the number of people actually using them.
Growth of 19 percent year over year
Transaction numbers are climbing faster than card numbers. In the second quarter of 2026, shoppers in Serbia made 237.9 million card purchases in stores, 19.3 percent more than in the same period of 2025. Of that total, 220.9 million purchases were made with cards issued by domestic payment service providers, while 17 million were made with cards issued abroad, meaning foreign cards used inside Serbia.
The NBS attributes part of that growth to Serbia’s rising appeal as a tourist destination, since foreign-card spending is turnover that would not exist without visitors from abroad.
Double the purchases five years later
A comparison with earlier data shows the scale of the change. In the second quarter of 2022, the card acceptance network in Serbia processed 116 million purchases. By the second quarter of 2026, that number had climbed to 237.9 million, a rise of 105 percent over five years, more than double. The pace has not slowed since 2022: transaction numbers rose quarter after quarter, and domestic cards kept a dominant share of total turnover, above 92 percent in both 2022 and 2026.
A network that keeps pace with spending
The rise in purchases has been matched by an expanding acceptance network. Merchants in Serbia had roughly 195,000 devices and solutions for cashless payment at the end of the second quarter of 2026, up 10.1 percent from a year earlier. The ATM network has grown too: 3,412 ATMs were operating in the country at the end of June 2026, 6.8 percent more than a year before.
Taken together, more POS terminals and more ATMs show that infrastructure is not lagging behind the number of cards issued but expanding alongside it. For merchants, that means less reliance on cash at the register. For the NBS, it confirms that Serbia’s long-term shift to cashless payment is continuing at the same pace it set five years ago.
