Electronic Stamp Duty in Indonesia: How to Buy and Use e-Meterai

Electronic stamp duty in Indonesia is Rp10,000 per document, paid by affixing an e-Meterai through one of five official portals. The procedure is short. What costs companies money sits outside it: knowing which documents are actually taxable, and why a stamp pasted in as a picture counts for nothing.

That second one is expensive. Under PMK 78 of 2024, payment is valid only if the stamp was affixed through the government's Sistem Meterai Elektronik and carries a live unique code. Otherwise the document is deemed unstamped. Not partially valid. Unstamped.

Every rule, portal name and limit below was read from its primary source on 16 October 2026: pajak.go.id, Peruri's press release, and the portal user guide at e-meterai.co.id.

Which documents are taxable, and which are not

Most companies over-stamp rather than under-stamp. The list of taxable documents is closed — if yours is not on it, the stamp is a cost with no effect.

Taxable, under Article 3 of Law 10 of 2020: agreements, statements and declarations and their duplicate copies; notarial and land deeds with their copies and extracts; securities and securities-transaction documents; auction documents; and anything submitted as evidence in court.

Then the category everyone misreads: documents stating a sum of money above Rp5,000,000 that acknowledge receipt of money or confirm a debt settled. That threshold applies to this category only. A contract is taxable at any value, including one naming no figure at all.

These, by contrast, are explicitly not objects of stamp duty:

• Diplomas and educational certificates of any kind.
• Receipts for salary, pension, allowances and other payments arising from employment.
• Goods-movement paperwork: waybills, bills of lading, storage receipts, and proof of delivery and receipt of goods.
• Receipts for money issued for internal organisational purposes.
• Pawn documents, and receipts for any kind of tax.

The third line usually comes as a relief. A distributor in Sidoarjo issuing hundreds of delivery notes a week stamps none of them. What needs a stamp is the distribution agreement behind them — one document, once.

Where to buy: five official portals, and what it really costs

Peruri, the state printing corporation, is assigned to produce and distribute electronic stamps, and Article 18 of PMK 78 of 2024 says it does so in cooperation with distributors. Press release 10/PR-PERURI/III/2026, dated 26 March 2026, named five.

All five run the same interface, because the system behind them is one. What differs is the help desk. Pick whichever you can reach by phone — a stuck quota is resolved by a human, never by the portal.

Now the price. Rp10,000 is the tax, not the total — Bank Mandiri's page for the service in its banking app says that price "does not yet include the service/platform fee", without an amount. Our search on 16 October 2026 found no official fee schedule that opens without a login, so none appears here.

One thing is certain in the other direction: the tax alone is Rp10,000, so anything offered below that is not the price of the stamp.

How to buy and use e-Meterai, step by step

This follows the official portal user guide. One warning: do not register on the day you need the stamp.

1. Pick the account type. Personal, Wholesale or Enterprise. A company should go straight to Enterprise, because only an Enterprise parent account can issue registration links for child accounts and suspend them again when someone leaves.
2. Fill in the data. Personal needs a 16-digit NIK (national ID), a 16-digit NPWP (tax number), and a phone number starting 08, 10 to 13 digits. Enterprise needs company details plus scans of the company registration and tax number, PDF, under 2 MB.
3. Wait for approval. After email activation, an Enterprise account still has to be approved by an administrator. Not instant — which is why last-minute registration ends badly.
4. Buy the quota. Enter the number of stamps, choose Pay, and the system issues a virtual account number. Payment can be made through a bank or in cash at a retail outlet.
5. Affix the stamp. Enter the date and document number, pick a document type from the dropdown, upload a PDF of no more than 4 MB. Drag the stamp where you want it, confirm, enter a PIN. The PIN is created once and reused later.
6. Download and check. The stamped file downloads and is emailed to you. Open the E-Meterai Scanner app from the Play Store or App Store, scan the QR code, and the serial number appears. If nothing appears, something is wrong.

That last step is the one people skip, and the fastest of the six. Five seconds with a phone camera tells you whether the document you are sending a client is really stamped.

What makes an e-Meterai count for nothing

One habit needs to stop: saving the stamp image from an old document and pasting it into a new PDF. It looks the same. Legally it is worth zero.

Beyond copy-paste, four technical failures repeat. The portal answers all four in its own FAQ.

• Upload rejected. The file must be a genuine PDF, no larger than 4 MB.
• The stamp shifts or covers text. A4 is the recommended page ratio; outside it the size and position can differ from what you saw on screen. Leave blank space where the stamp goes.
• Stamping fails after upload. Almost always an empty document-type field — it is mandatory — or a wrong PIN.
• Quota was deducted but the document failed. The one that causes panic and the easiest to fix: open Stamping History, find the document, choose Stamp Again. The portal states re-stamping does not deduct quota, and it can be repeated until it works.

Keep the PDF, not just a printout. The unique code is read from the file, and the file is what you fall back on if anyone asks.

If the document is already signed without a stamp

This happens more often than people admit, and there is an official remedy: pemeteraian kemudian, subsequent stamping.

PMK 78 of 2024 provides for it where duty was unpaid or underpaid, and for documents heading to court. For documents taxable on or after 1 January 2021, you pay the duty plus a 100 per cent penalty — Rp20,000 each. Before that date, 200 per cent. A post office or tax office official validates it.

Rp20,000 sounds cheap, and for one contract it is. But it is per document. If what slipped is three years of agreements with thirty partners, the arithmetic changes — before counting the hours of filing.

So the order we recommend is always the same: settle which documents are genuinely taxable, then talk about accounts and quota. That list is usually far shorter than the first guess.

Where the volume is too high to stamp one file at a time in a browser, the next step is wiring stamping into the system you already run — work that sits with a software house, or with custom application development.

Questions that usually follow

Unsure which documents need a stamp, which need an electronic signature, and which need neither? That is a half-hour conversation, and it can start with an IT consultant in Surabaya at no cost.