Like Christmas presents and the firemen’s calendar, every year at the beginning of January it’s a stressful time for foreigners living in Morocco who have to make payments abroad, renew subscriptions by direct debit, and so on.
Chronology of fluctuating Exchange Office regulations
Previously, like everyone else, foreigners were entitled to an e-pay card, for a limited amount, but which enabled them to make online purchases.
Then, very suddenly, the Office des Changes decided to exclude foreigners, who suddenly found themselves without any means of payment, unless they already had a convertible dirham or foreign currency account, with a credit card attached to it.
Faced with a general outcry, the Moroccan government backed down: foreigners still did not have access to the e-pay card, but they could benefit from a tourist allowance of at least 100,000 dirhams from which they could pay for their online purchases and their purchases abroad.
Conditions for benefiting from the tourist allowance if you are a foreigner resident in Morocco
You must :
- of course, be resident, i.e. have a valid residence permit]
- and have a valid passport (which is, incidentally, a condition of the validity of the residence permit)
- not be able to transfer dirhams to a convertible dirham or foreign currency account as salary savings ;
- open your tourist allowance at a single bank, even if you have several.
How to claim your tourist allowance
The tourist allowance is valid from the date of application to 31 December of the year of application. Unused amounts cannot be carried over to the following year. In other words, by midnight on 31 December (or 1 or 2 January in practice), you must renew your allowance.
For foreigners, the bank will check your identity papers and ask you to sign a declaration on your honour confirming that you have no salary savings.
It then requests a ‘reservation’ on the Foreign Exchange Office platform, gives you a number and asks you to sign a form using this number, before activating your tourist allowance.
This explains why foreigners have to go to a branch, whereas Moroccans can activate their endowment with one click online.
2024’s bumps in the road
For me, they were twofold:
- my bank warned me on 2 January at 11:48pm that my endowment had been reset to zero. So YES, I could have remembered, but sending the same message on 30 December would have made my life easier.
- When I went to the branch … there was a problem (as there is every year) with the Office des Changes platform. Too many connections? A bug in the change of year? Conditions? Who knows?
In any case, I had to turn to a friend to renew the domain name of this site, which was down today, and which was offline for a few hours because of this.
Regulations and practice
Perhaps your bank is more accommodating.
Maybe your case is slightly different.
Perhaps…
But if you have a tourist allowance, salary savings, an e-pay card and a smile from the Foreign Exchange Office, you’re simply benefiting from a loophole in the system. Make the most of it and you can be sure that one day the system will catch up with you!
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