Serbia Drops Paper Payment Slips at Counters From Sept 16

From Wednesday, September 16, 2026, the deadline expires for every state, provincial and local authority in Serbia to register with Plati, the information system that lets counter staff check on their own whether an administrative fee has been paid. As of that date, according to Jelena Bojovic, program director at NALED (the National Alliance for Local Economic Development), speaking to RTS (Radio Television of Serbia), citizens will no longer need to bring a paper payment slip as proof of payment.

Which law is the basis? Sources disagree

Mondo, Telegraf and Kurir cite the Law on Republic Administrative Fees as the legal basis, reporting that it took effect on September 8, 2026. Nova Ekonomija, citing a NALED statement, points instead to the amended Law on Electronic Administration, which requires all public administration bodies to enable electronic payment of every fee and charge they collect in their own procedures by the end of 2026 at the latest. Both versions agree on one date: authorities must register on the eUprava portal and in the Plati system by September 16.

How the counter check works

Bojovic described the technical side of the process, which until now had only been available to the Ministry of Interior (MUP), not to every authority.

“You come to the counter, they search by your unique citizen ID number, or by first and last name, they find your payment, they tick it off, mark that the payment was made, and they don’t ask you for any proof whatsoever,” Bojovic said.

The requirement is that every counter clerk has access to the Plati system and can see completed payments for any procedure a citizen is going through. “That means they have a place where they can see every payment made to the state, and on that basis they are not allowed to ask you for proof of payment,” Bojovic explained. She said MUP has already been using the system for several years, and from September 16 it becomes mandatory for all republic, provincial and local authorities, in practice for every institution where a citizen carries out any procedure.

QR code slip and email confirmation

Payments still go through the plati.euprava.gov.rs portal, but the payment slip itself now has to be generated through the system, not through old forms. “It’s important that you don’t use some of the old templates you previously used to pay these fees, but instead go through the Plati system,” Bojovic warned. The system generates a payment slip with a QR code, which can be printed and paid at a post office counter, and a payment confirmation is sent to the email address the citizen provides when generating it. Until every procedure and institution is fully connected, a general payment slip, where the citizen fills in the fee details themselves, remains available as well.

Fines up to 150,000 dinars for offices that still ask for proof

The law sets fines of 30,000 to 150,000 dinars for authorities and officials who fail to comply with the new requirement. Bojovic said NALED does not expect counter staff to keep asking citizens for paper payment slips after September 16, since checking the system is now a legal obligation, not an option.

How many fees have been logged so far

According to a NALED statement from September 8, more than 5,200 individual fees and charges at the state and local level, spread across 383 regulations, have so far been entered into the Unified Registry of Non-Tax Revenues, which is run by the Republic Secretariat for Public Policies. Of 145 local self-governments, 93 have completed or started the process, along with 44 republic-level authorities. The goal is to link the complete registry to roughly 8,000 procedures from the Registry of Administrative Procedures, and to give more than 9,000 authorities access to payment records. Nova Ekonomija adds that authorities that have not yet finished the process will get additional training during September.

Bojovic also announced the deadline for the next step of the reform: “By January 1, all authorities must enter all of their procedures and all of their fees into the system,” she said, without specifying the year in the statement itself. Judging by the other deadlines in the same reform, registration with the Plati system by September 16, 2026, the fee inventory by the end of October 2026, and electronic payment enabled by the end of 2026 according to Nova Ekonomija, the date in question is most likely January 1, 2027. Telegraf, citing the same statement, reports that the public administration system has around 700 procedures carried out by citizens and around 7,300 carried out by businesses, and that all of them should be entered by that deadline.

What’s next: fee prices

NALED has been working on parafiscal reform since 2011, and electronic payment, Bojovic explained, is only the second step. The first was logging every fee and charge, because, as she put it, “neither citizens nor businesses knew how many of these fees there were.” A third step, with no set deadline yet, should show where individual fees overlap and where some services cost as much as 20,000 dinars for no clear reason, opening the door to lowering fees afterward.