From 15 November, government cheque payments through Assignment Accounts stop. Disbursements that previously moved on paper will run through Raast, the State Bank’s instant payment rail, and the drawing and disbursing officers who handle them have already been trained.
Several accounts of this have described it as the end of cheques in Pakistan. It is not. The change applies to specified government Assignment Accounts and nothing else — personal and business cheques are unaffected, and no deadline has been set for them.
What actually changes
- Cheque payments through specified government Assignment Accounts end on 15 November
- From 16 November those payments route through Raast
- Drawing and disbursing officers across public institutions have been trained
- Personal and business cheques: unchanged
- Transaction volumes or number of accounts affected: not published
An Assignment Account is the mechanism through which a government department draws funds to pay salaries, contractors and operating costs. Moving those onto an instant rail removes the float, the physical handling and the reconciliation lag that paper introduces. It is a meaningful back-office reform and a narrow one.
The wider instruction
The cheque deadline sits inside a broader directive. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has asked officials for a clear roadmap and time-bound targets for a 100 percent digital payments system, with problems users encounter resolved immediately and internet access extended countrywide.
Officials briefed the meeting that payments in most federal and provincial institutions will be fully digitised by December 2026, that all Benazir Income Support Programme payments already go through digital wallets, and that work is under way on a payments system for areas without internet access.
That last item is the one worth holding on to. A digital payments system for places with no internet is a genuinely hard engineering problem, and the briefing offered no description of how it would work.
Related: JazzCash targets 2m QR merchants — a goal that implies its growth rate halving
A target with no numbers attached
The Prime Minister said positive results are already beginning to emerge. No figures were released to support that — no Raast transaction volumes, no values, no measure of what share of government payments is already digital.
That absence matters because “100 percent digital” is unmeasurable without a denominator. A roadmap with time-bound targets, which is what was requested, requires a baseline to set targets against, and none has been published.
The data does exist. The State Bank publishes payment system statistics quarterly, and Raast volumes are among the figures it reports. Citing them would have cost nothing and would have turned an assertion into a claim that could be checked.
Where the QR push meets the acceptance problem
Two of the directives concern merchant payments: that the Raast QR scheme should continue under government patronage, and that a media campaign should encourage electricity and gas consumers to pay through QR codes printed on their utility bills.
Utility bills are a sensible place to start. They are recurring, they already reach almost every household on paper, and the payer is identified — which removes most of the friction that stops people trying a new payment method.
The constraint is on the other side of the transaction. JazzCash alone had 1.7 million merchants on Raast by July against a target of 2 million by year-end, and the figure nobody publishes is how many of those merchants actually transact. A media campaign raises willingness to pay by QR; it does nothing about whether the shop has a working code on the counter.
Cheques are not the main obstacle
If the objective is a cashless economy, government cheques are an odd place to concentrate attention. A cheque is already a non-cash instrument — it moves money through the banking system, leaves a record and is reconciled against an account. Replacing it with an instant transfer is a gain in speed and administrative cost, not a change in whether the transaction is documented.
The money that is genuinely outside the system is physical currency in the hands of traders, transporters and households, and none of it passes through an Assignment Account. Pakistan’s currency-in-circulation problem is a problem of small retail transactions, not of government disbursement.
That is an argument about sequencing rather than about merit. Government payments are the part of the system the state actually controls, so starting there is reasonable — and a department that pays its contractors through Raast creates a counterparty with a bank account and a transaction record. The returns come from what that enables downstream, not from the cheque itself.
The part that is genuinely new
Most of this agenda has been announced before. A high-level committee on the cashless economy was formed in June 2025, and in July 2026 the Prime Minister directed that remittances from abroad be fully digitised.
What distinguishes the 15 November change is that it has a date and a consequence. A department that has not switched cannot pay by cheque from that morning, which is a harder commitment than a roadmap and the reason the training of disbursing officers was the necessary precondition.
Whether it holds is the thing to watch next week. Deadlines of this kind in Pakistani administration have a history of slipping quietly, and the test is not the announcement but whether any department finds itself unable to disburse on 16 November.
