The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government has announced that all person-to-government payments across the province will transition to a fully cashless digital mode by September 1, 2026, positioning the province to become the first in Pakistan to operate a fully digital government revenue receipt system across its public services.
The transition is being driven through the Mahasil, meaning revenue application, which integrates existing online payment platforms with a dedicated provincial payment gateway. Citizens will be able to pay service fees, fines, and licence costs directly into the provincial treasury using Quick Response codes and digital platforms including Raast and the 1-Go payment service, removing cash as an option for government transactions and eliminating the human interaction in financial processes that officials have identified as a primary source of revenue leakage. To ensure the transition has a legal foundation, the provincial government is currently amending its finance rules through the Finance Act 2026, providing the regulatory framework needed to make cashless-only receipts mandatory rather than optional across government departments.
Senior officials leading the reform programme have projected that the shift will raise annual provincial revenue by approximately 70 percent, an estimated increase of over Rs. 29 billion, attributing most of this expected gain to the elimination of cash handling at the point of collection where leakage has historically occurred. The government has cited existing data from early digitisation efforts to support the projection, noting that arms licence revenue rose from Rs. 1.45 billion in 2022 to Rs. 2.50 billion in 2025 after the licensing process was moved to a digital collection model, and that fine collections by assistant commissioners recorded a 69 percent increase following the shift from manual to digital receipts. These outcomes suggest that the revenue gains from digitisation accrue not merely from better record-keeping but from a structural reduction in the proportion of collected funds that never reaches the treasury.
The province has already digitised 148 public services and plans to complete the digitisation of all 172 services within the coming months, with the September 1 cashless mandate covering this full set of services. Beyond the core government service network, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa also plans to extend the Mahasil model to over 600 non-Account-1 services provided by autonomous bodies, local governments, and public corporations, further broadening the scope of the province’s transition toward a transparent, digital-first public finance ecosystem.
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