From 1 September the digital rouble stops being optional for the key institutions and businesses covered by the law. Law № 248-ФЗ of 23 July 2025 takes effect that day: Russia's systemically important banks have to provide access, and large sellers have to accept payment in it. The budget side of the system went into the Budget Code a year earlier and has been operating since.
Three waves for the banks, three for the shops
Article 4 of the law sets the calendar. The duty to let clients carry out digital-rouble operations, written into article 30.7 of the National Payment System law, applies from 1 September 2026 to systemically important credit institutions and those the CBR has designated significant in the payment-services market; from 1 September 2027 to banks with a universal licence; and from 1 September 2028 to all remaining credit institutions.
For sellers, the same law amends the Consumer Rights Protection law. The permanent rule it inserts is a revenue threshold of twenty million roubles for the preceding calendar year. That rule does not apply yet. The transitional provisions set the actual sequence: from 1 September 2026 the duty falls on a seller whose revenue for the preceding calendar year exceeds 120 million roubles and who on 1 January 2026 was a client of a systemically important bank, or of one designated significant in payment services, under a contract for accepting electronic means of payment. From 1 September 2027 the threshold drops to 30 million roubles. From 1 September 2028 it reaches everyone else. Two exemptions remain in the permanent text: a place with no mobile-telephone or internet access, and a trading outlet whose own revenue was under five million roubles for the preceding calendar year.
The same law also makes the universal payment code — issued free of charge by the operator of the national payment card system — the only means by which a bank may show a customer transfer details on a device that can read them. Cross-border transfers are exempt.
The Treasury's account and the Code's exclusion
Law № 303-ФЗ of 31 July 2025 put the budget side into the Budget Code. Its first article makes two changes to article 6, where the Code defines its own terms:
“(a) in paragraph thirty-two, after the words ‘bank accounts),’ add the words ‘with the exception of the Federal Treasury's digital-rouble account,’; (b) add a new paragraph thirty-four reading: ‘the Federal Treasury's digital-rouble account — a digital-rouble account opened for the Federal Treasury by the operator of the digital-rouble platform for carrying out operations with digital roubles’.”
The new article 242.11-1 then describes how money reaches that account:
“The increase in the balance of digital roubles on the Federal Treasury's digital-rouble account, by the amount needed to execute the said order to transfer digital roubles, is carried out by the operator of the digital-rouble platform by transferring funds in the corresponding amount from the bank account that forms part of the single treasury account and is named in the order to transfer digital roubles.”
So the account holds no standing balance. The Treasury sends an order to the platform's operator — the Bank of Russia, on whose platform, by its own account, every digital-rouble operation takes place — and the operator tops up the account for that one payment from a bank account within the single treasury account. Incoming money follows the same route in reverse: the balance goes down and the funds return to the bank account.
The dates are in article 3. The law took effect ten days after publication. The incoming side applies from 1 January 2026 to receipts into the budgets of the budget system and to transfers of money to federal budgetary and autonomous institutions in digital roubles. Everything in article 242.11-1 applies to money from regional budgets, local budgets and state extrabudgetary funds, to money belonging to participants in treasury support, and to funds held at temporary disposal only from 1 July 2027 — ten months after the first shops.
Article 2 delegates the decision in a single sentence: in 2025, execution of the federal budget through this account covers expenditures “the list of which is established by the Government of the Russian Federation in agreement with the Central Bank of the Russian Federation.” The law names no expenditure itself.
What the CBR promises about the money supply
Today's CBR release describes the retail regime: one account per person and two for a sole trader; top-ups from one's own bank accounts capped at 300 thousand roubles a month for individuals and uncapped for business; payments and transfers free for individuals, free for business to the end of 2026, with fees from 2027. Among the operations it lists are “payments into and out of the budget”.
On the money supply the bank has been explicit for more than a year. Its status document of 30 June 2025 says:
“Thus only the structure of the money supply will change. The issue of the digital rouble by the Bank of Russia will not by itself be accompanied by an increase in the rouble money supply (the M2 aggregate) — other things being equal, its total volume will remain unchanged.”
The same document identifies the mechanism that makes this worth watching rather than filing away. The CBR pays no interest on digital roubles, and “the possibility of earning income only on funds placed in bank accounts will support their attractiveness.” Money that moves into a wallet is money that has left a deposit. Whether that matters for the banks that would have to buy government debt is not settled by today's start — we looked at what they were doing with OFZ in July, and a cap of 300 thousand roubles a month per person is small relative to those balance sheets.
What this means for our model
M2 growth scores 85 out of 100, the second-best of the eight, on a reading of 13.1% year on year; the strength index is at 46.3. Today changes neither number, and thresholds are never moved after the fact.
Today adds a question about the series itself. The CBR's methodological commentary on M2 was last updated on 27 September 2024 and does not contain the words “digital rouble” anywhere. It defines M2 as cash outside the banking system plus non-cash balances of residents on accounts in Russia's banking system, and transferable deposits as balances on demand accounts “opened at the Bank of Russia and operating credit institutions”. Whether a digital-rouble account on the Bank of Russia's own platform counts as one of those is not written down anywhere we can read. So we register a watch item: an unexplained dip in the September or October M2 readings should be checked against the methodology before it is read as an economic signal. The commentary says nothing about the Treasury's own digital-rouble account either. The rest is on the monitor.
What we do not know
The CBR gave no number today for how many digital-rouble accounts exist. It has not said whether the M2 commentary will be updated for 1 September. The list of federal expenditures that article 2 of law № 303-ФЗ leaves to the Government is not in the law, and we have not seen it published. The 2027 tariffs are described only as the lowest on the payment market, which is not a figure. And the whole channel stays voluntary at the receiving end: the CBR's own page says an account is never opened automatically and no payment is made in digital roubles without the recipient's consent — the constraint that decides whether the budget side carries anything at all.