How to Collect Rent Digitally in Rwanda — MTN MoMo, Airtel & Bank Transfer

Let me paint you a picture. It’s the 5th of the month. You have six tenants across three properties in Kigali. You’re checking your MoMo SMS history, scrolling back through 40 unrelated messages trying to figure out who has paid. You call one tenant. No answer. You ask a neighbour to knock on the door. The neighbour says the tenant travelled for work.

This is the reality for most Rwandan landlords in 2026. And it’s completely avoidable.

Rwanda has three solid digital payment methods that can transform how you collect rent. Here’s exactly how each one works, what it costs, and how to stop losing track of who has paid.

Kigali, Rwanda — one of Africa’s fastest-growing urban economies

Those numbers are from MTN Rwanda’s Q3 2025 results. Mobile money isn’t a niche tool in Rwanda anymore — it’s the backbone of everyday financial life. Which means your tenants are almost certainly already using it. You just need to make it easy for them to pay you.

MTN Mobile Money (MoMo)

MoMo is the obvious first choice. With 5.8 million active users and 246 million transactions processed every single month, it has the deepest reach of any payment method in Rwanda. The fee for a tenant to send you money is just RWF 20 per transaction — cheaper than the cost of printing a receipt.

How your tenant pays you

1. Dial *182#
2. Select Transfer Money → To a MoMo Number
3. Enter your MoMo number and the rent amount
4. Confirm with their PIN

You get an SMS confirmation within seconds. The money is in your wallet immediately.

MoMo fees at a glance

What MoMo cannot do (yet)

One thing worth knowing: MoMo doesn’t support true automatic recurring payments. Every month, your tenant has to manually initiate the transfer. There is no “standing order” equivalent. This means rent collection is still dependent on the tenant remembering to pay — which is why tracking who has and hasn’t paid matters so much.

Airtel Money

Airtel Money works on the same principle as MoMo but runs on Airtel’s network. If you have tenants who are on Airtel, this is what they’ll use. The dial code is *185#.

The important thing to know is that MoMo and Airtel Money are separate systems. A tenant on Airtel cannot directly send money to your MTN MoMo wallet without using an interoperability bridge, which adds friction. If a significant number of your tenants are on Airtel, it is worth registering for both MoMo and Airtel Money. It takes about 30 minutes at any Airtel agent.

Bank Transfer

Bank transfer is the right choice for higher-value rents, commercial properties, or tenants who already do their banking digitally. It creates a clean paper trail that is very useful when tax season comes around — which, as we explain in our RRA tax guide, is exactly what the Rwanda Revenue Authority recommends.

To receive bank transfers, give your tenant:

• Your full name (as registered with the bank)
• Bank name (Bank of Kigali, Equity Bank Rwanda, I&M Bank, Cogebanque etc.)
• Account number
• Reference: their name + unit number

The real problem: knowing who has paid

Here is the honest truth that most payment guides leave out. Receiving the money is rarely the hard part. The hard part is knowing, at any given moment, exactly which of your tenants has paid for the current month — and which ones haven’t.

If you’re managing three properties manually, here’s your current workflow: check MoMo SMS → check Airtel SMS → check bank app → cross-reference with your notebook → call whoever you think might be late → repeat next month.

DomLift replaces all of that. You log each payment when it comes in — it takes about 10 seconds — and the dashboard shows you the full picture instantly. Who’s paid, who’s late, payment history going back as far as you need. And at the end of the year, you can export the full record for your RRA declaration.

Which method should you default to?

The best practice is to accept all three and tell tenants to use whichever is easiest for them. What matters is that every payment ends up in one place where you can see it.