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Islamic Credit Cards
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Is there an Islamic credit card available in Pakistan?

Pakistan is constitutionally bound to end riba by 2028, and has two Islamic credit cards

Pakistan's largest Islamic banks issue no credit card at all. Several Pakistani comparison sites describe ones that do not exist, in detail, including the contract they supposedly use.

Last reviewed 2026-08-17

The short answer

Only two institutions in Pakistan issue a Shariah-compliant credit card: Faysal Bank, with its Noor range, and Standard Chartered Saadiq. Meezan Bank, BankIslami and Dubai Islamic Bank Pakistan, which are among the country's largest Islamic banks, do not. Their current Schedules of Charges contain no credit card entry at all. This matters because Pakistan wrote a deadline into its constitution: the 26th Amendment, assented on 21 October 2024, requires riba to be eliminated completely before 1 January 2028.

The deadline is constitutional, not just judicial

This is usually reported as a court ruling, which undersells it. The Constitution (Twenty-sixth Amendment) Act 2024, Act No. XXVI, assented on 21 October 2024, substitutes Article 38(f) so that the state must "eliminate riba completely before the first day of January, two thousand twenty-eight".

That is the constitution of Pakistan setting a dated obligation to remove interest from the financial system, now under three years away.

Set that against the market as it actually stands: two Islamic credit card issuers, one of which is a foreign bank.

The judicial and constitutional deadlines match

This deadline is frequently attributed to the Federal Shariat Court's April 2022 judgment, and that judgment is real: we read it in full and it specifies 31 December 2027, the same effective date as the constitutional deadline, set two years before the constitution caught up. The 2028 date used above comes from the constitutional amendment, verified word for word against the National Assembly's own published Act, because that is the binding legal instrument today.

Who actually issues one

  • Faysal Bank, which completed its own conversion to full Islamic banking in 2023, offers the Noor range: Velocity, Gold, Titanium, Platinum, World, plus Noor Flexi and a corporate card.
  • Standard Chartered Saadiq offers a Mastercard Platinum. It does not publish an annual fee, stating only that it is set by an internal grid.
  • Neither publishes a minimum income requirement.

The cards that do not exist

Several Pakistani comparison and fintech sites publish descriptions of Islamic credit cards from Meezan Bank and BankIslami, including a "Meezan Visa Platinum credit card using Tawarruq". We checked the banks' own current Schedules of Charges. Meezan, BankIslami and Dubai Islamic Bank Pakistan return zero occurrences of "credit card" between them, against 37, 19 and 22 occurrences of "debit card".

There is a plausible mechanical explanation for how the error spread. HBL's Islamic cards page renders a "Credit Cards" navigation heading whose link is a dead anchor going nowhere. Bank AL Habib's page has the identical trap. A scraper, or a writer skimming, sees a heading that says Credit Cards on an Islamic banking page and concludes the product exists.

How to check any claim like this yourself

Open the bank's own Schedule of Charges, which the State Bank of Pakistan requires it to publish, and search it for the words credit card. If the product existed, it would have to be priced there. A product page that will not name a fee is not evidence of a product.

Why the gap is so wide

Pakistan's Islamic banks have concentrated on deposits, home and vehicle financing and debit cards. A credit card is a harder product to build without interest income and a harder one to underwrite, and the domestic card market is small relative to the population.

The result is a market where the religious demand is near-universal, the legal mandate is now constitutional, and the supply is two issuers. Whether that closes before 2028 is the single most interesting question in Islamic retail finance right now.

Sources

The contracts mentioned here

TawarruqThe bank sells you a commodity on credit at a marked-up price, you sell that commodity to somebody else for cash, and the cash becomes your spending limit.UjrahThe bank charges you a fixed fee for the service of giving you a card, rather than a charge that grows with the money you owe.

Read next

Why there is almost no Islamic credit card in the WestFour of the largest Western Muslim populations, and between them close to nothing. This is not an oversight by the banks. The economics and the disclosure law both work against the product.Is a credit card halal?The short answer is that scholars disagree, and the disagreement is not a technicality. Here is what each side actually argues, who holds each position, and what it means for the card in your wallet.

Not a fatwa, not financial advice. This guide explains how the products and contracts work and sets out where scholars disagree. Whether something is permissible for you is a question for a scholar you trust who knows your circumstances.