The Treasury's catalogue does carry this one. Its entry, driver's licence issuance fees, publishes no amount, and that page says so. This page explains what the Treasury leaves out, where the real figure is, and why the number in the headlines is not a state fee at all.
Three kinds of money get mixed together here, and keeping them apart is the whole job.
What the state charges
| What | Set by | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Stamp duty, national licence | Tax code, article 550 (a) | 10,000 FCFA |
| Stamp duty, duplicate of a licence | Tax code, article 550 (a), same rate | 10,000 FCFA |
| Stamp duty, certificate of competence for certain urban vehicles | Tax code, article 550 (b) | 10,000 FCFA |
| Fiscal stamp on the application paper | Tax code, article 547 | 1,500 FCFA |
| Issuing fee | Ministry of Transport, not published | No published amount |
Article 550 (a) of the 2026 edition reads: "Les permis de conduire nationaux et leurs duplicata sont soumis à un droit de timbre fiscal de F CFA 10 000." Article 464 is the separate rule saying a licence is liable to stamp duty at all, distinguishing national licences from their duplicates.
The stamp doubled, and we can name the law that did it. The 2022 edition of the same article read 5,000 FCFA. Law No. 2022/020 of 27 December 2022, the Finance Law for 2023, lists article 550 among the tax code articles it amends and then enacts it under a new heading, "B bis - PERMIS DE CONDUIRE", at 10,000 FCFA. We read that in our own copy of the law. It took effect on 1 January 2023.
The same article of the same law raised the fiscal stamp at article 547 from 1,000 to 1,500 FCFA for normal paper and half sheets, which is why several other figures on this site moved on the same date.
There is one more text that joins the two halves of this page. Order No. 00406/A/MINT/DTT of 28 April 2000 regulates driving licences and driving schools. Its article 46 reads: "Les permis de conduire délivrés en vertu du présent arrêté sont soumis aux droits de timbre en vigueur." It sets no amount of its own. It refers the stamp out to the tax code, which is where the 10,000 lives.
There is no renewal line
Article 550 names the national licence and its duplicate. It does not name renewal.
That looks like deliberate drafting rather than an oversight, because the tax code names renewal when it means to. Three articles later, article 553 sets the stamp on a firearms permit at 100,000 FCFA and adds: "Ce même tarif s'applique à leur duplicata et à leur renouvellement." Article 461 does the same for residence cards.
So we cannot tell you what a renewal is stamped at. Either it is treated as a fresh national licence at 10,000 FCFA, or it carries no stamp line at all. Both readings are available on the text and we are not choosing between them. The Treasury catalogue does not help: it has no separate record for renewal, for a duplicate, or for exchanging a foreign licence.
The fee nobody publishes
The Treasury's entry is called "Frais d'établissement de permis de conduire", Ministry of Transport, Road Transport Directorate. Its amount field is empty. Its pricing rules field is empty. It names the 2024 Finance Law as its legal reference and sends the user to permicam.cm.
Two things about that are worth stating plainly.
The empty amount is deliberate and maintained. The record was published on 9 June 2026 and was still being updated on 21 October 2026, the day we read it. Thirty nine of the Ministry's fifty five catalogue entries do carry an amount. The field is used when a tariff exists. Here, the payment form asks the citizen to type in the amount to be paid.
And the legal reference does not support a tariff. The 2024 Finance Law is Law No. 2023/019 of 19 December 2023. Its article 33 prices transport authorisations and licences, at 150,000 FCFA for several of them, citing Decree No. 2022/8801/PM of 10 October 2022. The phrase permis de conduire appears in that document only in a table of traffic fines. It sets no licence fee.
Follow the official chain and it ends behind a login. mintransports.cm, the Ministry's live site, has placeholder links where its texts, circulars and decisions should be, and publishes no fee schedule. Its secure documents portal has placeholder links too. permicam.cm, the address the Treasury itself points at, is a login page. The tariff, if it is published anywhere, is published to people who already have an account.
There is also an examination fee, and it is the clearest example on this page of a charge the state created and never priced. Article 19 of the same 2000 order says fees are payable by candidates for organising the licence examinations, and that part of them pays the jury's allowances, "dont le montant est fixé par un texte particulier du ministre chargé des transports". We could not find that text, and no amount is published anywhere. A charge exists in law with no published figure, which is the gap the commercial guides fill with numbers ranging from 20,000 to 240,000 FCFA.
The Ministry's own statistical yearbook for 2025 is worth one correction while we are here. The biometric licence is often described as something Cameroon has done. In that yearbook it appears once, in a list of priorities for 2026 to 2030: "Permis de conduire : modernisation des procédures (biométrie, dématérialisation des examens théoriques) et instauration du permis à points." It is a plan. What actually changed recently is the stamp.
The licences themselves are printed by Presbyterian Printing Press, named in the same yearbook as "l'organe qui assure l'impression des permis". What it is paid, and under what concession, is not published.
The 250,000 is a driving school price
In January 2023 Journal du Cameroun ran the headline "Cameroun : les frais de permis de conduire désormais à 250 000 F". Read as written, that says the state put licence fees up to 250,000 FCFA. It did not.
The body of the same article gives it away: "La décision est ressortie de l'assemblée générale des promoteurs d'auto-écoles". A trade association of driving school owners in the Centre region met on 22 December 2022 in Yaoundé and agreed a price list. One of them, Serge Yoba, explained what it buys: "le payement de frais de 250.000FCfa pour deux mois ; le respect de 40h de cours théoriques et de 20h de cours pratiques". And what it was meant to stop: "Pour une formation à 50 ou 60.000FCfa, on ne peut vraiment pas vous donner même le quart du temps réglementaire."
Two things about that list which the headlines all dropped. Every line of it reads "à partir de", from, so 250,000 is a floor and not a price. And the same list offers a shorter category B course, ten hours of theory and ten of practice, from 150,000 FCFA.
| What the assembly agreed | Price |
|---|---|
| Registration, all categories | 10,000 FCFA |
| Category A, two months | From 75,000 FCFA |
| Category B, two months, 40 hours theory and 20 practical | From 250,000 FCFA |
| Category B, 10 hours theory and 10 practical | From 150,000 FCFA |
| Category T, two months | From 100,000 FCFA |
| Categories C, D and F, two months | From 400,000 FCFA |
What they adopted alongside it was a code of conduct signed by the school owners themselves. Not an order, not a decree. No text fixes 250,000 FCFA, and none ever has: a 2016 congress of the national driving schools' union had set 250,000 and 300,000 for a fast track in exactly the same way, which the state newspaper reported at the time as what it was, a trade decision.
So 250,000 FCFA is a private floor price for private tuition, set by the people who sell it, binding on nobody. It is not comparable to the 10,000 FCFA stamp, and adding the two together produces a number that means nothing.
This is the single clearest example on this site of a private cost reported as an official fee, and it is why we split this page into three.
The figures that do not reconcile
| Claim | Who publishes it | Against what |
|---|---|---|
| Licence stamp 10,000 FCFA | Tax code, article 550, 2026 edition | The law. This is the figure |
| Licence stamp 5,000 FCFA | Tax code, article 550, 2022 edition, and still circulating | Superseded |
| Licence stamp rising to 25,000 FCFA | A viral message, November 2023 | Denied by the Ministry |
| "Official charges" 11,500 FCFA | infospratiques.cm, an aggregator | Unconfirmed |
| "Un permis de conduire coûte 250 000 FCFA" | temovision.com, an aggregator | A private training price |
The 25,000 claim produced the only official statement we can point to, and we have read the document itself.
It is a Note d'information on the Ministry of Transport's bilingual letterhead, from the Secretariat General, Communication Unit, headed "PAS D'AUGMENTATION DU TIMBRE DU PERMIS DE CONDUIRE EN 2024" and, in its own English half, "NO INCREASE IN THE DRIVER'S LICENSE STAMP IN 2024". It reads:
Une information, devenue virale, circule sur les réseaux sociaux. Selon celle-ci, les FRAIS DE TIMBRE du Permis de conduire passeront de 5 000 FCFA à 25 000 FCFA dès janvier 2024. Le Ministère des Transports porte à l'attention de l'opinion publique nationale et internationale qu'il s'agit d'un FAKE NEWS. Aucune augmentation du timbre du Permis de conduire n'est envisagée.
Three things about the document. It carries no reference number. It carries no date. And it is signed by the Chef de Cellule de la Communication, not by the Minister, which at least one outlet got wrong when it reported the denial as the Minister's.
It was made public on 13 November 2023, a date established from the reporting that carried it rather than from the paper. The Ministry never published it on its own site: we walked the entire communiqués archive on mintransports.cm and it is not there. The only copies are hosted by news sites.
Now the interesting part, which is the baseline. The note denies a rise "de 5 000 FCFA à 25 000 FCFA". But article 550 had said 10,000 FCFA since 1 January 2023, set by the 2023 Finance Law eleven months before the note was written. The communication unit truthfully denied a rise that was not coming, and repeated a current rate that its own government had already doubled.
The 11,500 claim is worth one line because the arithmetic is tempting: 10,000 for the licence stamp plus 1,500 for the fiscal stamp on the paper is exactly 11,500. The aggregator publishing it gives no breakdown, and we found no text requiring both stamps on one application. It is a plausible decomposition, not a verified total.
temovision.com manages three incompatible figures on one page: the stamp at 5,000, the licence at 250,000 and the issuing price at 10,000, plus 240,000 for application and examination. Three of those four numbers refer to different things and the page treats them as one.
Converting a foreign licence
We found no Cameroonian text and no official amount. What we can state is the obligation, from the French foreign ministry, which is authoritative about French licences and not about Cameroonian fees: a French licence is valid for three months after arrival, after which conversion at the Ministry of Transport is compulsory, and a French international driving permit is not recognised in Cameroon. The figures circulating for the conversion itself come from expatriate guides, one of them more than a decade old, and we do not repeat them.
One number to keep out of your budget
Failing to present a licence, or driving without one, is a 25,000 FCFA fine under article 41 of the highway code and a 1990 police circular. It is a penalty, not a fee. It happens to be the same figure as the stamp increase that was denied in 2023, and the two are unrelated.
Sources
Read on 21 October 2026 unless another date is given.
- General Tax Code, 2026 editionour copy, impots.cm. Articles 464, 547, 550 and 553. Archived in full. The 2022 edition was read for the earlier 5,000 FCFA stamp.
- Law No. 2023/019 of 19 December 2023our copy, Finance Law for 2024, and its explanatory memorandum. Article 33 on transport authorisations. Filed at prc.cm.
- Ordinance No. 2024/001 of 20 June 2024our copy, checked for article 550 and found not to touch it.
- The Treasury's catalogue of payable services, entry MR027-FR-14, read through the public interface.
- Ministry of Transport, TRANSTAT 2025 statistical yearbook, on the biometric plan and on the printer.
- mintransports.cm, permicam.cm and the secure documents portal. No fee schedule on any of them.
- Ministry of Transport, Note d'information, "Pas d'augmentation du timbre du permis de conduire en 2024". We read the signed scan. It carries no number and no date. It is hosted by news sites, not by the Ministry, whose own communiqués archive does not contain it.
- Order No. 00406/A/MINT/DTT of 28 April 2000 regulating driving licences and driving schools. Articles 19 and 46. Read from a legal information host, not an official one.
- Law No. 2022/020 of 27 December 2022our copy, Finance Law for 2023, article seventeenth, which amended articles 547 and 550. Archived here and read directly.
- 237online, 27 December 2022, for the driving school assembly's own price list, and Journal du Cameroun, January 2023, for the headline that turned it into a licence fee. Cameroon Tribune for the 2016 precedent.
- infospratiques.cm and temovision.com, aggregators, for the competing claims above.
- Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs of France, travel advice for Cameroon, on the three month validity of a French licence.
There is no online Journal Officiel for Cameroon. prc.cm is the de facto gazette, and its page for the 2023 Finance Law carries no document.
If a figure here is wrong, tell us. The method is written out at how we verify.
Page updated 21 October 2026