Money & Currency in Mozambique

Money in Mozambique, the short version

The metical comes in notes of MT 20 to MT 1,000 (sign MT, currency code MZN), and how you’ll actually pay for things here splits three ways:

• Cards work at hotels, lodges, supermarkets, fuel stations and the better restaurants. Bring Visa.
• Cash is what everywhere else runs on — markets, chapas, small guesthouses, tips.
• Mobile money is what Mozambicans use, and it’s why a guide may offer you a phone number instead of a card machine.

Keep your cash in small notes. A shop won’t break a MT 1,000 bill for a cold drink, so a stack of MT 100s and 200s gets you further than a wallet of big ones. It’s the single most common thing travellers get wrong here, and it costs them a morning.

Bring a backup card on a different network, and ask your accommodation and tour operator what they take before you arrive — deposit, balance and extras are sometimes three separate transactions.

After a day or two on the ground you’ll stop converting in your head, and the prices start to make their own sense.

What the metical is worth

One US dollar buys roughly MT 64, one South African rand roughly MT 4, and one euro roughly MT 74 — rates that have moved unusually little over the past few years, because Banco de Moçambique manages the metical closely against the dollar. That stability is genuinely useful when you’re budgeting months ahead: a quote you were given in March is still roughly the right number in September.

Treat the converter as an indication, not a promise. The rate you personally get depends on where you change money and what that counter charges: a bank, a casa de câmbio, an ATM and your card issuer will each give you a slightly different number, and the spread between them is usually worth more than the fee. Banco de Moçambique publishes its own dated reference rate if you want the official benchmark to compare against.

Cards: bring Visa

Visa is the card to bring to Mozambique. Both networks exist here, but Visa is accepted more widely and declined less often — at ATMs, at hotel terminals and at restaurants — and a traveller arriving with only a Mastercard is meaningfully more likely to have an awkward evening. If you have both, bring both and lead with the Visa. If you only have one, make it that one.

Where they work: hotels and lodges everywhere, including the island lodges on Bazaruto and Benguerra, plus supermarkets, fuel stations and the better restaurants in Maputo, Vilanculos, Tofo and Inhambane. Where they don’t: markets, barracas, small guesthouses and anything run out of somebody’s front room.

Tell your bank you’re travelling, and carry the second card somewhere separate. A card a fraud algorithm has frozen is functionally the same as no card at all.

Cash: which foreign currencies actually work

US dollars, South African rand and euros are all accepted in Mozambique — with one condition on the dollars that catches people out every season.

• US dollars — new notes only. The large-portrait redesign, series 2006 and later, with colour in the paper. Old-style small-portrait dollars are routinely refused outright, by banks and câmbios as well as shops, and there’s no arguing with it. Check your notes before you pack them; a fifty you’ve had in a drawer since 2001 is not money here.
• South African rand. Easiest currency to spend in the south and along the coast, and widely quoted at lodges. Rand coins are usually refused — bring notes.
• Euros. Straightforward to change in Maputo and the bigger towns; the rate gets noticeably worse the further you get from a city.

Notes of any currency want to be clean and untorn. A counter that will happily take a crisp note will hand a taped or heavily creased one back, and that applies to meticais too.

For changing money, use a bank or a licensed casa de câmbio, compare the total you actually receive rather than the advertised rate, count it before you walk away and keep the receipt. Street changers are illegal and a reliable way to lose money.

For an EKAYA booking, confirm payment instructions with us directly before you transfer anything. If you get an unexpected message asking you to send a balance to a new name or number, check it with us through a channel you already know.

ATMs: where they work, where they don’t

Mozambican ATMs typically cap a single withdrawal at MT 5,000 — about $80, or roughly R 1,250. That’s the number that surprises people: you cannot pull a week’s cash out in one go, and if you need MT 20,000 you are standing at that machine for four transactions, paying your own bank’s foreign-withdrawal fee on each one. Plan for that, or plan to use a card.

The network itself is better than most first-time visitors expect. Every provincial capital has several machines from different banks, and most towns of any size have at least one. Millennium bim, BCI and Standard Bank are the names you’ll see most.

Before you withdraw: check the machine’s displayed fee and limit, and know your own bank’s daily cap and overseas charge. If the ATM offers to bill you in your home currency, decline — that’s dynamic currency conversion, and the rate is almost always worse than letting your own bank do the maths.

When ATMs run dry

An ATM can fail because it’s offline, out of cash, or simply won’t talk to your card — and all three happen, particularly over a long weekend or at month-end when local salaries land. Don’t wait until the evening before a boat trip to discover that your only payment method doesn’t work.

Draw what you need before an island stay or a long transfer day, because there is no machine waiting for you on Bazaruto or Benguerra. Keep your cards in two different places, withdraw somewhere you’re comfortable, and put the cash away before you walk off. If you’re carrying large amounts in or out of the country, the entry guide covers the declaration thresholds.

Mobile money: M-Pesa, e-Mola and mKesh

Mozambique runs on mobile money more than on cards, and the scale is easy to underestimate: Banco de Moçambique’s financial-inclusion indicators put mobile-money accounts at 118.7 per 100 adults in the second quarter of 2025 — more wallets than there are grown-ups — while bank accounts reach barely a third of adults. The phone, not the bank branch, is where most Mozambicans keep and move money.

Three wallets cover the country — M-Pesa (Vodacom), e-Mola (Movitel) and mKesh (Tmcel) — and since 1 July 2022 all three have been interconnected, so a payment moves between wallets on different networks. Before that, which network someone was on decided whether you could pay them at all.

For a visitor, this is mostly background: it explains why a guide, a driver or a market seller will offer you a phone number instead of a card machine, and why topping up airtime or paying a small local bill is instant here. You can register a wallet yourself — Vodacom’s M-Pesa page lists a passport as an accepted identity document — but you’ll need a local SIM and the registration to go through, so it’s worth the effort on a long stay and rarely worth it on a week’s holiday. See staying connected for the SIM side of it.

If someone asks to be paid by mobile money and you don’t have a wallet, cash is always the fallback, and it always works.

The easiest way to send money to Mozambique

The easiest way to send money to Mozambique is a remittance app that pays into a mobile wallet, because it lands in the M-Pesa account the person you’re paying already uses — which is why it works when a card payment doesn’t, and why it beats a bank wire for anything small. Remitly is the one we’d point you to right now: it delivers to a Mozambican mobile wallet, including M-Pesa, it lands in minutes rather than days, and the conversion is normally better than sending through your own bank. Open your own country’s version of the site, since funding options and fees differ by where you send from.

Four steps, in order:

1. Confirm the wallet, registered name and number through a contact channel you already know — not from a message you just received.
2. Pick the mobile-money delivery method in the app and check the recipient details twice.
3. Compare fee, rate, total sent and total received before you confirm.
4. Wait for both the app and the recipient to confirm arrival. A screenshot of a transfer you’ve started is not a transfer that has landed.

Set the account up before you need it. Verification can take a day, and the moment you need this is rarely the moment you have a spare day.

We use Remitly ourselves — here’s the sign-up. Offers, rates and transfer speeds change, so check the current terms in the app before you send.

Take the rate with you

A lockscreen for your trip.

Save it as your phone's lockscreen - quick price reference at the market, in a tuk-tuk, or when a vendor hands you a price you can't quite parse.

Pick your home currency

MT -> USD MT -> EUR MT -> ZAR MT -> GBP

Download USD wallpaper

iPhone: save the image, open it in Photos, tap the Share icon, then Use as Wallpaper -> Lock Screen.
Android: save the image, open it in Photos or Gallery, tap the menu, then Set as wallpaper -> Lock screen.

A rough estimate, as of April 2026 - for the current rate, check the live converter higher up the page.

What a trip here costs

Trip budgeting lives on its own page — what a Mozambique trip costs has the honest bands by travel style, real food and transport prices, and the costs nobody warns you about. For getting between towns, our transfer prices are published per vehicle, one way.

What everyday things cost in meticais

Everyday prices in Mozambique are best learned in meticais, not converted. These are the ones you’ll meet in Vilanculos in a normal week, and they’re the numbers that tell you whether something you’re being quoted is a local price or a visitor price:

Those five numbers are most of what daily life costs. A restaurant meal aimed at visitors runs several times the market plate, which is the gap worth understanding before you decide anything is expensive or cheap here.

What people earn

Mozambique sets its minimum wage by sector, revised every year, and the 2026 figures were approved on 28 April 2026 with effect from 1 April. The spread is wide:

Tourism and hospitality got the largest rise of any sector this year, 9.28%, from MT 9,700. At the current rate that minimum is roughly $165 a month, or about MT 480 for a day’s work.

Hold that last number next to the tipping amounts below. A MT 300–500 tip to a guide is not loose change rounded off a bill — it’s close to a day’s minimum wage in the sector, which is why tipping in Mozambique is worth doing deliberately rather than absent-mindedly.

Two things give that wage table less reach than it looks. The World Bank puts informal work at more than 80% of employment in Mozambique, and agriculture at more than 70% of the population — so most people work outside the salary table altogether, in biscates, small trade, transport and seasonal work. And around 500,000 young people enter the labour market each year against roughly 25,000 new formal jobs. The minimum wage protects the people inside formal employment; a great many Mozambicans are earning outside it.

The change problem

Nobody has change, and it is the most reliable friction in Mozambican daily life. It runs in two directions, and both catch visitors out.

Foreign notes first. A shop, a driver or a guide has no reason to hold dollars, rand or euros, so if you pay a MT 400 fare with a $20 note there is genuinely nothing to give you back. Foreign cash is for exchanging at a bank or casa de câmbio, not for spending in the street.

But meticais are the harder half. On the wages above, a seller’s whole float for the morning may be a few hundred meticais — so a MT 1,000 note handed over for a MT 20 loaf isn’t rudeness being met with rudeness, it’s a real problem you’ve just created for someone. They may have to walk to a neighbour to break it.

So: break big notes where breaking them is easy — a supermarket, a fuel station, your lodge — and hold on to the MT 20s, 50s and 100s that come back. Treat small change as the useful currency it is here, and most of your day-to-day friction disappears.

Tipping

Tipping is genuinely voluntary in Mozambique, and nobody will chase you for it — but it matters a lot to the people receiving it, and it’s one of the more direct ways your money reaches the person who actually looked after you. These are our suggested amounts, not a national rule:

• Restaurants: 10% if a service charge isn’t already on the bill (check — some places add 10% as taxa de serviço).
• Tour guides: MT 300–500 per guest on a day trip; MT 500–1,000 per guest per day on multi-day trips.
• Boat crews: MT 200–400 per guest on a day trip. Tip them separately from the guide where you can, or tell the guide the envelope is for both.
• Hotel housekeeping: MT 100–200 per night, left on the pillow or with reception.
• Porters: MT 50–100 per bag.
• Drivers (private transfer): MT 200–500 for the trip, more for long distances or extra help with bags.

Tip in meticais where you can. Dollars and rand are accepted, but the person you’ve tipped then has to find somewhere to change them — and small foreign notes often can’t be changed at all. Meticais is money they can spend on the way home.

A few things we wish we’d known

The small decisions that save a frustrating morning:

• Break your big notes early, and keep the change. When you pay for something substantial, ask for MT 100s and 200s. Nobody has change here, and a wallet of MT 1,000s is a wallet you can’t spend.
• Check your dollars before you pack them. Small-portrait notes get refused. This is the mistake that most often leaves someone stuck at a counter.
• Draw cash before an island or a long transfer day. There’s no machine on Bazaruto, and the MT 5,000 cap means topping up takes planning, not a minute.
• Decline the ATM’s own conversion. When it offers to charge you in pounds or euros, say no and let your bank convert — the machine’s rate is worse, every time.
• Save receipts offline. Keep entry, accommodation and activity confirmations reachable without mobile data.
• Confirm the unit before comparing prices. A quote can be per room, per person, per vehicle or per boat, and the difference is enormous.

What’s on the notes and coins

Mozambique’s current banknotes are the 2024 series, and the first thing to notice is that the small ones feel like plastic. The 20, 50 and 100 meticais notes are printed on polymer; the 200, 500 and 1,000 are paper. That’s not a quirk of wear — it’s how they were issued, set out in Aviso 8/GBM/2024, published in the Boletim da República on 14 June 2024 and in circulation since 16 June 2024.

Every note carries a portrait of Samora Moisés Machel, the country’s first president, and the issue date 16 DE JUNHO DE 2024. Each note also gets its own theme, colour and length — the notes grow 3 mm longer with every step up in value, which is how you tell them apart in a dim restaurant without reading the number:

The three polymer notes have a transparent window holding a bird’s feather on a gold ground and a woven straw purse. The three paper notes use colour-shifting ink instead — tilt a MT 1,000 and the elephant moves. All six carry a denomination marker for blind and partially sighted readers, rock-art images in the lower corners of the reverse, and a map of Mozambique.

The feather is not decoration. It sits in the polymer window, on the back of every paper note, and alone on the one-centavo coin — and the Aviso says what it is for. Its words are pena de uma ave simbolizando a origem do Metical — a bird’s feather symbolising the origin of the metical. The name itself comes from the Arabic mithqāl, a unit of weight and another name for the gold dinar traded across much of Africa until the 19th century. Mozambique’s money is named after a weight of gold, and quietly says so on every note.

The coins

The 2024 series has seven coins: 1, 10 and 50 centavos, and 1, 2, 5 and 10 meticais. Six are round. The 1 metical is heptagonal — seven-sided, the only coin in the set you can identify in your pocket without looking at it.

The MT 10 is the only bimetallic coin — nickel-plated steel core, brass-plated ring — which makes it the easy one to find by feel. In practice you will mostly handle MT 5 and MT 10; the centavo coins are close to worthless and rarely change hands.

Is my old note still good?

Yes. Notes and coins from the earlier series remain full legal tender alongside the 2024 issue — nothing was demonetised, and no deadline was set. Article 12 of the Aviso, headed Circulação simultânea, says it plainly:

As notas e moedas metálicas do Metical em circulação à data da entrada em vigor do presente Aviso continuam a ter curso legal obrigatório e valor liberatório ilimitado e pleno dentro do território nacional.

In other words, every note and coin already circulating on 16 June 2024 keeps compulsory legal-tender status and full, unlimited discharging power across the country.

So a 2006-series note in your wallet from a previous trip still spends. What doesn’t survive is a note that’s badly damaged; take that to a bank rather than trying to pass it on.

A short history, in case you’re curious

The metical replaced the Mozambican escudo at par on 16 June 1980, five years after independence — which is why every series since has been dated to 16 June. A second family followed on 1 July 2006, when the currency was redenominated at 1,000 old meticais to one new one and the ISO code changed from MZM to MZN. The 2024 series is the third.

Banco de Moçambique’s numismatic collection records the earlier families, and its 2006 chronology documents that revaluation. The practical consequence for a traveller: any Mozambique price you read from before 2006 is quoted in a different currency altogether, and any price from before about 2020 has been overtaken. Work from a current quote.

Where to go next

Still not sure?

Money questions are easier to answer with a real itinerary in front of us. Send us a WhatsApp with what you’re planning and we’ll give you a realistic budget, tell you which towns have working ATMs the week you’re there, and flag anything that catches travellers off guard. While you’re at it, look at our Bazaruto day trip for a sense of what excursions cost.

Once you’re here, we’ll take care of the logistics. See our other travel tips for visas, packing, and what to expect on the ground, or our travel resources for the transfer services, card apps and budgeting tools behind the numbers on this page.

Last reviewed: 9 September 2026. Exchange rates and prices fluctuate — always confirm the current rate at xe.com before you travel. Referral disclosure: the Remitly links on this page are referral links; if you sign up and transfer through them, EKAYA earns a small credit at no extra cost to you. We recommend Remitly because we use it ourselves. Sources: Banco de Moçambique, Aviso 8/GBM/2024 (Boletim da República, I Série n.º 116, 14 June 2024) for every banknote and coin specification and the legal-tender position; Banco de Moçambique on the mobile-wallet interconnection; the central bank’s exchange-market reference, financial-inclusion indicators for Q2 2025 and numismatic collection; Wikipedia: Mozambican metical for the 1980 and 2006 currency changes. The 2026 minimum wages and the informal-employment share come from the Observatório do Meio Rural’s analysis of the government communiqué of 28 April 2026, which cites World Bank and ILO data. Everyday prices, ATM limits, card-network acceptance and note-condition practice are our own day-to-day experience running tours in Mozambique, plus conversations with guests who’ve travelled the country end to end.