How to buy US stocks from Pakistan (checked November 2026)

Updated November 2, 2026 · 12 min read

Buying US stocks is already legal for Pakistani residents. The foreign exchange manual lets each person remit 25,000 dollars a year for shares listed abroad. What stops people is banks refusing to release the dollars. The other route is a crypto exchange: Bybit's real stocks are open to Pakistan, xStocks are not. Binance received a no-objection certificate from PVARA in December 2025, but that is not a licence. On the legal side, the Virtual Assets Act 2026 penalises unlicensed platforms and has no clause aimed at individual users, much like China. This page covers the rules, where the three exchanges stand, rupee deposits and tax.

Based on each exchange's published restricted-jurisdiction list. What the registration page shows is final.

ID documents

CNIC or passport

Deposit channels

P2P (buy USDT from other users) · Bank transfer

Regulation

The Virtual Assets Act passed in March 2026 and the licensing rules took effect on 21 August; as of early November no firm holds a full licence. The NOC Binance received in December 2025 is not a licence, and Bybit and OKX have no NOC at all. The law penalises unlicensed platforms and has no clause aimed at individual users.

1. What buying US stocks from Pakistan actually looks like

Start with something many people don’t know: it is legal for Pakistanis to buy US stocks. Chapter 20 of the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) foreign exchange manual says so plainly. A resident individual can remit money through an authorised bank to buy shares of companies listed abroad, up to 25,000 dollars per calendar year, holding no more than 1% of any single company, with no prior approval from the SBP. Overseas brokers such as Interactive Brokers (IBKR) also accept Pakistani residents, and the ID is your CNIC or passport.

What stops people isn’t the law. It’s the dollars. Walk into a bank with the SBP clause and ask to remit money for “investment in foreign securities”, and most counters will send you back for more documents again and again, or just say no. Cards don’t work either. The SBP caps card spending abroad at 30,000 dollars per person per year across all cards combined, and brokers don’t take card deposits anyway. In October 2026 the interbank rate was around 277 rupees to the dollar, with the open market two or three rupees worse, and that’s the price under exchange controls. So the rule lets you buy, but in practice very few people get through this route. Local licensed brokers’ apps mostly cover the Pakistani stock market only and don’t sell US stocks.

So people took another route. Pakistan ranked third in the Chainalysis 2025 global crypto adoption index, behind only India and the United States. The chairman of PVARA himself estimates 30 to 40 million people in the country use crypto. The P2P market is genuinely deep. At the end of October 2026 a third party counted 1,394 ads live on Binance’s rupee P2P market, 232 on OKX and 151 on Bybit. You transfer via Easypaisa or JazzCash, the USDT lands in minutes, and that is what a “dollar account” actually looks like for Pakistanis. Once you have USDT, swap it for USDC and you can buy real stocks inside the exchange.

2. Which exchange works

Bybit is the most direct choice. Its real stocks (Bybit Stocks) are executed and held by the US broker Alpaca. The official list of unavailable regions is the European Economic Area, India, Mauritius and the UAE, and Pakistan isn’t on it. Pakistan isn’t on Bybit’s account-level restricted list either. One thing to watch: Bybit’s tokenized stocks, xStocks, explicitly exclude Pakistan in the official list, so on Bybit you can buy real stocks but not xStocks. Rupee P2P takes Easypaisa, JazzCash and bank transfer. There are far fewer ads than on Binance, but enough for small amounts. Bybit hasn’t received a no-objection certificate from PVARA. One report says it has filed an application, but PVARA doesn’t publish the applicant list.

Binance is the one closest to the Pakistani government of the three. On 12 December 2025 PVARA issued no-objection certificates (NOCs) to Binance and HTX, and the government signed a memorandum with Binance the same day to explore asset tokenization. But the PVARA chairman said that very day that an NOC is not a licence. It only lets them register with the anti-money-laundering system, set up a local subsidiary and prepare a formal application. “This is not the finish line, it’s the foundation.” As of early November 2026, no exchange has received a full licence in Pakistan. Binance’s rupee P2P is the deepest of the three, taking Easypaisa, Raast, bank transfer, SadaPay and NayaPay, though the late-October count found no JazzCash ads. Binance has never published which regions its real stocks and bStocks are open to, so sign up and see whether the entry point shows in the app. One more thing: on 30 October 2026 Binance suffered the largest theft in crypto history. It began restoring withdrawals in phases from 1 November and says it has covered 95% of user losses.

OKX has made no licensing moves in Pakistan and has no NOC. It has no real stocks, only tokenized xStocks, and officially says these are open in Southeast Asia, Northeast Asia, the CIS, the Middle East and North Africa, and Turkey. South Asia, where Pakistan sits, isn’t on that list, but OKX also has no country-by-country exclusion list, so what counts is whether the entry point shows after you log in. Rupee P2P has 232 ads, covering a dozen or so banks plus Easypaisa, JazzCash and Raast, and in the late-October count OKX had the lowest USDT price of the three.

My advice: if you want to buy and hold real stocks, open Bybit. It’s the only one of the three that is explicitly open to Pakistan for real stocks. For large USDT purchases, go to Binance P2P first, where there are more ads and better prices, then move the USDT to Bybit. If you only want tokenized stocks, Bybit won’t do, so log in to OKX and take a look. You can open all three at once. KYC with a CNIC takes about half an hour each.

3. What Pakistani law says

This part is about the rules. The short version: Pakistan is one of the countries whose stance on crypto has flipped most completely in the past two years, from “banks may not touch it” to “the government issues licences”. The new law penalises unlicensed platforms and has no clause aimed at individual users, much like China.

Timeline

• April 2018: the SBP issued a circular barring banks and payment providers from handling any crypto business. Holding and trading as an individual wasn’t banned; you just couldn’t move money through a bank.
• December 2021: the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), citing the 2018 circular, froze 1,064 bank accounts and credit cards used to buy and sell crypto on Binance, Coinbase and other platforms. In January 2022 the FIA asked the telecoms regulator to block crypto websites, and the regulator refused for lack of a legal basis.
• 14 March 2025: the government set up the Pakistan Crypto Council with Bilal bin Saqib as CEO, and the stance began to turn.
• 8 July 2025: the president signed the Virtual Assets Ordinance, creating the Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (PVARA) and choosing a licensing route.
• 12 December 2025: PVARA issued no-objection certificates to Binance and HTX, the first batch.
• March 2026: parliament passed the Virtual Assets Act, turning PVARA from a temporary ordinance body into a statutory one.
• 14 April 2026: the SBP issued a circular allowing banks to open accounts for PVARA-licensed firms. The 2018 ban ended there.
• 21 August 2026: the licensing rules took effect and applications opened, with 11 licence categories. Platforms already operating had to apply for a no-objection certificate by 5 September or stop serving. After the deadline the PVARA chairman said 70 applications had come in.
• Early November 2026: not one firm has received a full licence yet. Reports say the first batch is expected before the end of the year.

What the new law means for you

Section 54 of the Virtual Assets Act says that knowingly providing virtual asset services without a licence carries up to five years in prison or a fine of 50,000,000 rupees. The target is “the person providing the service”, meaning the platform and its executives. There is no corresponding penalty in the law for an individual user trading on an unlicensed platform. There is one clause that applies to everyone, on market manipulation and insider trading, and that has nothing to do with you buying stocks.

Read literally, every exchange operating in Pakistan today is still unlicensed. Binance has an NOC, but an NOC is not a licence, and Bybit and OKX don’t even have an NOC. But that is a matter between the platforms and the regulator. The regulator’s energy is going into licensing, anti-money-laundering and segregating platform funds, not individual accounts. It’s a lot like China: strict on paper, and nobody bothers individuals buying and selling on their own.

What individuals really need to guard against is something else: frozen bank accounts. Those 1,064 accounts in 2021 were frozen on the grounds that they showed “crypto-related transactions”. Since the turn in 2025 there has been no action on that scale, but P2P accounts still get frozen all the time when they receive scam proceeds and then get caught up in a victim’s police report. Section 4 covers how to avoid that.

I’m not a lawyer, and the text of the rules is laid out here. Given how enforcement works today, the real risk for an individual buying and selling small amounts is low. If you want to be completely at ease, waiting for the first batch of full licences before you start is fine too.

Tax

Pakistan has no tax provision specifically for crypto. The widely circulated claim that “crypto is taxed at a flat 15% capital gains tax” is false. The Finance Act that took effect on 1 July 2026 has no such clause, and a dedicated tax scheme is still at the proposal stage. Current practice follows the general rules of the Income Tax Ordinance: profit from selling after holding counts as a capital gain, and frequent trading may be treated as business income at progressive personal rates. In reality most people don’t declare their small P2P trades, and the tax authority has no capacity to check them one by one. Strictly speaking, what you earn buying US stocks inside an exchange falls in the same bucket. Don’t panic over small amounts. If you earn a lot, ask a local accountant, and get your filer status sorted while you’re at it. Banks are a lot friendlier to filer accounts.

4. How to deposit

None of the three takes direct rupee deposits, so everything goes through P2P. You pick a merchant on the P2P market, send rupees from an Easypaisa, JazzCash or bank account in your own name, and the merchant releases USDT. The P2P price is about 3% above the interbank rate. That’s the normal premium under exchange controls. Don’t go looking for ads below market price; those are mostly traps. Once you have USDT, swap it for USDC inside the exchange and buy stocks.

Take Bybit as the example. On the home page tap “Buy Crypto”, choose P2P, set the fiat currency to PKR, filter for Easypaisa or JazzCash, pick a merchant with high volume and a high completion rate, enter the amount and place the order. Transfer to the account details shown on the page, tap “Paid” when done and wait for the merchant to release. For small amounts, buy directly on Bybit. For a large purchase, Binance P2P has more ads and better prices, so buy there and then withdraw the USDT to Bybit over TRC20 or BEP20. The fee is around 1 dollar.

Account freezes are a real risk. Five rules:

1. Trade only inside the platform. Don’t let a merchant pull you into WhatsApp for a private transfer.
2. The sending account must be in your own name, and the merchant’s receiving account name must match what the platform shows. If it doesn’t, cancel the order.
3. In the transfer note write only the order number. Don’t write USDT, crypto, Binance or similar words.
4. Open a separate Easypaisa or bank account just for P2P, apart from your salary account, so a problem doesn’t touch your everyday money.
5. Keep a screenshot of every trade. If an account gets frozen, that’s your evidence for getting it unfrozen.

5. Four steps

6. FAQ