Is Quotex Legal in Saudi Arabia? The Real Picture

Quotex is not licensed by Saudi Arabia's Capital Market Authority (CMA), and there's no licence category the platform could realistically hold, since CMA's mandate covers Saudi Arabia's securities and authorised-persons framework rather than offshore retail fixed-time trading. We searched for any public statement from CMA or the Saudi Central Bank (SAMA) naming Quotex, qxbroker, or binary/fixed-time options specifically. We found none. What we did find is a Royal-Order-mandated Permanent Committee, chaired by CMA with SAMA and three government ministries as members, running an active, long-running public campaign against unlicensed forex and digital-currency activity generally, a more institutionalised posture than most markets this site covers. Saudi Arabia also carries a dimension no other market on this site has: many Islamic scholars and recognised fiqh bodies classify binary and fixed-time options as impermissible under Sharia. Both factors deserve serious weight here.

TL;DR: Legal Status in One Table

Bottom line: trading on Quotex isn't named as illegal by any Saudi authority we could find, and it isn't licensed or endorsed by one either. That absence of a Quotex-specific warning sits alongside an unusually well-resourced institutional effort against unlicensed forex and crypto activity in general, and a separate, serious religious question that most other markets this site covers simply don't carry. Treat "no warning found" as a genuine gap in public information, not a green light, and treat the religious dimension as a matter deserving its own consideration, not a footnote.

What We Searched For, and What We Found

We looked specifically for any CMA or SAMA statement, alert, or list mentioning Quotex, qxbroker.com, or fixed-time/binary options trading platforms generally, the way Pakistan's SECP or Indonesia's Bappebti have done for similarly-structured platforms. We found no such statement naming Quotex directly. What we did find is a considerably more active general enforcement apparatus than in several other markets this site covers.

A Permanent Committee formed by Royal Order. Saudi Arabia established a standing body, the Permanent Committee for Awareness and Warning against unlicensed Forex activity and unlicensed digital currencies, chaired by CMA and including SAMA, the Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Media, and the Ministry of Commerce as members. This isn't a one-off press release; it's a coordinated, cross-government structure specifically tasked with public warnings on this exact category of activity.

A long-running joint awareness campaign. CMA, SAMA, and the Ministry of Commerce and Investment have issued joint warnings against unlicensed forex activity dating back to at least 2017 and have repeated and reiterated that warning since. The consistent message: unlicensed individuals and entities promote forex trading and unlicensed digital currencies with promises of fast returns, these activities carry high risk of financial loss and exploitation, and Saudi authorities do not license forex companies to operate, advertise, or sponsor events inside the Kingdom at all.

A CMA statement specifically on virtual currencies. The same Standing Committee has separately and directly stated that virtual currencies are not regulated inside the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, a relevant point given that crypto is the practical funding route most Saudi Quotex traders use.

We did not find a CMA or SAMA statement naming Quotex, qxbroker, or this category of platform by name. If a statement exists that our research didn't surface, that would change this assessment, and we'll update this page if one emerges. As things stand, the honest answer is: no public regulatory statement specific to Quotex was found, but the general institutional posture against this category of activity in Saudi Arabia is unusually assertive.

What CMA Actually Regulates

The Capital Market Authority oversees the organisation and development of Saudi Arabia's capital market: issuing regulations under the Capital Market Law, licensing "authorised persons" who conduct securities business, supervising the Saudi Exchange (Tadawul), listed companies, and registered investment funds operating within that framework.

Offshore retail fixed-time trading, of the kind Quotex offers, sits outside that structure entirely. It's not that CMA has a licence category for this and Quotex failed to obtain it; it's that no such licence category exists for this instrument type in Saudi Arabia's securities framework, similar to how most jurisdictions Quotex operates in have no specific licence class for fixed-time contracts either. What differs in Saudi Arabia is the intensity of the general warning machinery aimed at the broader category this platform belongs to, even without Quotex being named individually.

External reference: Capital Market Authority — official portal

What SAMA Regulates on the Banking and Currency Side

The Saudi Central Bank (SAMA) is the Kingdom's central bank and the authority over banking, payment systems, and currency matters. SAMA has been a joint signatory on the forex-warning campaigns described above alongside CMA and the Ministry of Commerce, reflecting that this is treated as a shared regulatory concern rather than one body's sole responsibility.

On the practical funding side, SAMA oversees mada, Saudi Arabia's domestic debit card network. mada cards carry an international co-badge (Visa or Mastercard) for cross-border use, but a charge to an overseas trading platform still passes through your issuing bank's own risk policy, and declines for this merchant category aren't uncommon. This is a bank-level restriction rather than a SAMA rule naming Quotex or trading platforms specifically.

The Saudi riyal has been pegged to the US dollar at a fixed rate since 1986, which removes one variable that traders in several other markets on this site have to account for: the SAR-equivalent of a USD deposit doesn't drift with exchange-rate volatility the way it does for currencies like the Angolan kwanza or Pakistani rupee.

External reference: Saudi Central Bank (SAMA)

Is Cryptocurrency Legal in Saudi Arabia?

This sits in a genuine grey zone, and it's important to state it precisely rather than round it in either direction. SAMA and CMA have publicly and repeatedly stated that virtual currencies are not regulated inside the Kingdom, and both institutions warn that trading them carries high risk with no government protection if something goes wrong. SAMA also restricts licensed Saudi banks from directly facilitating crypto transactions.

That is a different thing from a criminal ban on individual ownership or trading. There is no specific Saudi statute that criminalises an individual for buying, holding, or peer-to-peer trading cryptocurrency, and Saudi residents access international exchanges, including Binance's P2P market for Saudi riyal, in practice every day. The Kingdom's own posture toward digital assets has also grown more complex at the institutional level: in 2025, SAMA disclosed indirect Bitcoin exposure through a stake in Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy), and Saudi Arabia has separately announced plans, developed jointly by CMA and SAMA, for a regulated stablecoin framework aimed at modernising cross-border payments. None of that changes the retail-facing warning that virtual currencies remain unregulated for individual Saudi users today.

If you're using USDT bought via Binance P2P to fund a Quotex account, you are not committing a named criminal offence under current Saudi law, as far as our research found, but you are operating in a space both regulators have explicitly flagged as unregulated and risk-bearing.

External reference: CMA — Standing Committee warning on virtual currencies

Is Fixed-Time / Binary Options Trading Legal in Saudi Arabia?

No Saudi statute names fixed-time contracts or binary options specifically as legal or illegal in the way, for example, Indonesia's Bappebti has named and blocked platforms in this category. What exists instead:

• No licensed product category: CMA has no licence covering this instrument type, and its mandate doesn't extend to offshore OTC platforms of this kind.
• No regulatory protection: Because CMA doesn't license it, there's no investor compensation scheme, no dispute mechanism, and no enforceable conduct standard applying to Quotex or similar platforms.
• A materially active general warning posture: the Royal-Order-mandated Permanent Committee, and the repeated joint CMA/SAMA/Ministry of Commerce campaigns, target unlicensed forex activity broadly. Binary and fixed-time options trading falls within the kind of activity these warnings are aimed at, even without a platform-specific mention.
• No specific Quotex warning, as far as we found: unlike Pakistan, where SECP named Quotex directly, or Indonesia, where Bappebti blocked the qxbroker.com domain by name, we found no CMA or SAMA statement naming Quotex or this category of trading by platform name.

Trading itself isn't a named criminal offence for an individual in Saudi Arabia under the sources we reviewed. The absence of a platform-specific warning doesn't mean the activity carries government endorsement or protection, and it sits inside a regulatory environment that has invested more institutional effort into warning against this general category than most jurisdictions this site covers.

The Religious (Sharia) Dimension: A Separate and Serious Consideration

This is a factor unique to this market among the country pages this site covers, and it deserves its own honest treatment rather than a passing mention. BrokerGrove is not a religious authority, and nothing below is our own theological opinion. What follows is a summary of publicly available scholarly rulings, reported as fact and sourced accordingly.

The prevailing scholarly view classifies binary and fixed-time options as impermissible (haram). The International Islamic Fiqh Academy, a body affiliated with the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, issued Decision No. 63 (1/7) addressing binary options contracts. Its reasoning: these contracts do not fall under any recognised Islamic contract type, because the subject of the contract is neither money, a usable benefit, nor a financial right that is permissible to compensate for. Fatwa bodies applying this reasoning, including Islamweb's Fatwa Center, have stated plainly that binary options are forbidden.

The core objection is the resemblance to gambling (maysir), not merely interest (riba). The recurring argument across scholarly sources is that a fixed-time contract has an all-or-nothing payoff determined purely by a price-direction guess over a short window, with no underlying asset actually bought, sold, or exchanged. That structure, according to this line of reasoning, functions as a wager on an outcome rather than a trade in a real asset, which places it under maysir (gambling) rather than legitimate bay' (sale) or a recognised form of partnership or lease. A related concern raised in the same rulings is gharar, excessive uncertainty, which Islamic commercial law also treats as invalidating a contract.

Platform-side "Islamic account" marketing doesn't resolve this objection. Some fixed-time and forex platforms, Quotex included in its own blog content, market a swap-free account structure and describe it as compatible with Islamic finance because no overnight interest is charged. That addresses only the riba side of the equation. It does not address the maysir and gharar objections that the International Islamic Fiqh Academy and multiple fatwa bodies raise against the underlying contract structure itself, which exists independently of whether a swap fee is charged.

We did not find a specific published statement from the Permanent Committee for Islamic Research and Ifta (Saudi Arabia's official standing fatwa body, headed by the Grand Mufti) addressing binary or fixed-time options by name. We looked. If one exists and our research didn't surface it, we'll update this page. What we can report with confidence is the broader scholarly consensus reflected in rulings like the International Islamic Fiqh Academy's decision above, and the consistent reasoning fatwa bodies apply to this contract type generally.

This is not a matter this site can settle, and we're not attempting to. For a Muslim reader, whether an instrument is permissible is a question for a qualified scholar, one's own understanding, and, where relevant, a formal fatwa request to a recognised Ifta authority, not for a trading-review website. What we can do, and have tried to do above, is lay out the sourced scholarly position accurately and without minimising it, alongside the separate regulatory question. Many readers weighing whether to use Quotex from Saudi Arabia will find this consideration at least as significant as the CMA's regulatory posture, and we've treated it that way here.

External reference: International Islamic Fiqh Academy — Decision No. 63 (1/7) on binary options, via Islamweb Fatwa Center

What This Means in Practice for Traders

No regulatory recourse if something goes wrong. If Quotex disputes a withdrawal or restricts an account, there's no Saudi regulatory body positioned to intervene on a Saint Kitts and Nevis-registered company's behalf.

A genuinely active general warning environment, even without a Quotex-specific mention. The Permanent Committee's Royal Order mandate and the repeated joint CMA/SAMA/Ministry of Commerce campaigns signal that Saudi authorities treat unlicensed forex and digital-currency activity as a standing enforcement priority, not a category they've quietly left unaddressed.

Crypto funding sits in an explicitly flagged grey zone. SAMA and CMA have stated plainly that virtual currencies are unregulated inside the Kingdom. Using USDT via Binance P2P to fund a Quotex account isn't a named criminal act under the sources we reviewed, but it operates in a space both regulators have publicly warned carries risk with no institutional protection.

A separate religious weighing applies on top of the legal one. The scholarly consensus reflected in sources like the International Islamic Fiqh Academy's ruling treats this instrument type as impermissible. That consideration exists independently of, and alongside, the CMA's regulatory silence on Quotex by name.

No tax clarity. We found no published Saudi tax authority guidance on how gains or losses from offshore fixed-time trading should be treated, leaving that question unresolved for traders with material profits.

For the full platform assessment, including features, deposit routes, fees, and our overall take, see Quotex Review for Saudi Arabia. For how the deposit routes mentioned above actually work, see How to Deposit on Quotex from Saudi Arabia.

Our Position on This Assessment

We're not telling Saudi traders they should or shouldn't use Quotex, on either legal or religious grounds. Both of those calls belong to the individual, informed by their own research and, on the religious question, by a qualified scholar rather than by us. What we've tried to do here is lay out both dimensions honestly: CMA has no mandate over this kind of platform and hasn't named Quotex in any public statement we could find, but Saudi Arabia runs an unusually well-resourced, Royal-Order-mandated campaign against unlicensed forex and crypto activity generally, more institutionally active than most markets this site covers. Layered on top of that is a genuine, widely-held scholarly position that classifies this instrument type as impermissible under Sharia, a factor that carries real weight for many readers and that we're not going to gloss over or bury beneath the regulatory summary. Weigh both seriously before you fund an account.

Last updated: 5 July 2026. BrokerGrove — independent reviews for Saudi traders. Published by Aariz Khan. This is an independent website not affiliated with Quotex.

Sources used on this page: - Capital Market Authority — official portal - CMA — Standing Committee warning on virtual currencies - SAMA — MCI, CMA and SAMA warn public against unlicensed forex activities - Ministry of Commerce — Permanent Committee for Awareness and Warning against Forex - Ministry of Commerce — MCI, CMA, SAMA reiterate warning against suspicious investment websites - International Islamic Fiqh Academy — Decision No. 63 (1/7) on binary options, via Islamweb Fatwa Center - mada — Saudi Payments Network, official site - qxbroker.com — official platform