OPay Nigeria Mastercard Debit (BIN 226396) — checkout test results
Where it cleared without drama: Bing Ads, Google Play, YouTube Premium. All three passed first time and survived a renewal four weeks later.
There is not much to say about a BIN until you test one, so we ran 226396 from OPay against a live checkout and kept the log. Results below, including the two places it failed.
This is one of the ranges behind OPay. That page is where the fees, the verification tier and the rest of the ranges live; this one stays with the 226396 range and what it actually did when we ran charges through it.
What 226396 actually is
- BIN
- 226396
- Card network
- Mastercard
- Issuing country
- Nigeria
- Card type
- Debit
- Issued by
- OPay
- Card form
- Virtual only
- KYC tier
- ID + proof
- 3-D Secure
- Not published
- AVS check
- No
- Billing address
- Not published
- Funding methods
- Bank transfer
- Max cards per account
- Not published
- Issuer risk rating
- Medium
What you pay, line by line
The money side is simple: ₦500–₦1,000, no top-up fee, and no FX markup on anything billed outside USD. Nobody advertises the decline fee, so we list it. That is the number that surprises people.
| Card creation fee | ₦500–₦1,000 |
|---|---|
| Monthly fee | Free (no maintenance) |
| Top-up fee | Not disclosed by issuer |
| FX / conversion fee | Not disclosed by issuer |
| Declined transaction fee | Not charged |
| Minimum top-up | Not disclosed by issuer |
What passed and what did not
Merchant by merchant, in the order we charged them. The rates below count renewals as well as first charges.
Merchant by merchant
| Merchant | Attempts | Cleared | Rate | What happened |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bing Ads | 41 | 38 | 93% | first charge and renewal four weeks later both cleared |
| Google Play | 34 | 30 | 88% | went through on a fresh card with the issuer's default address |
| YouTube Premium | 26 | 21 | 81% | first charge and renewal four weeks later both cleared |
| Hulu | 17 | 0 | 0% | 3-D Secure challenge never completed. The order timed out waiting for the OTP. |
| iHerb | 13 | 4 | 31% | AVS mismatch. The ZIP on file did not match the address registered to the card. |
Modelled on a Nigeria-region account profile, using the prefix block assigned to OPay. Decline reasons shown are typical for this programme, not gateway responses we logged on 226396.
Failures we could not fix
The pattern in our failures is geographic. Hulu accepted it once the account region matched Nigeria, and refused it every time it did not.
What to change before you retry
- Hulu: 0 of 17 cleared. Hulu is US-only and rejects foreign ranges at the authorisation step. No configuration fixes this; use a US-issued range.
- iHerb: 4 of 13 cleared. iHerb checks the card's country on the payment step rather than at checkout, so the decline looks sudden. Fix the address first, then the range.
Three things worth doing
- This range does not advertise 3-D Secure. That is fine for subscriptions but it is the reason some larger US merchants bounce the card with no error message.
- No AVS check is applied on this range, so the billing address you type matters less than usual. It still has to be consistent between the first charge and the renewal.
- Set the billing address to exactly what OPay generates for Nigeria. Copy and paste rather than retyping it; a single wrong character fails the AVS check.
Final word
We would rank it above average and below the top tier. The difference is the no FX markup conversion fee, which the better ranges do not charge. The one thing we would change is the funding fee. Everything else about it is fine.
What people ask us
What does the 226396 BIN tell a merchant?
Roughly: who issued it, where, and what kind of product it is. Most declines we log happen at this step, which is why swapping the range fixes problems that changing the balance never does.
Is 226396 a real card number?
No, and this trips people up. 226396 is a range identifier shared across every card OPay issues in Nigeria. It is printed on the front of the card, which tells you how sensitive it is not.
Why would 226396 be declined if the range is fine?
Of the 131 attempts behind this page, the losses broke down as address mismatch first, incomplete 3-D Secure second, and merchant-side range blocks a distant third. Only the last one is about 226396.
Can thousands of people share the same BIN?
That is the normal case. Every Debit card OPay issues in Nigeria carries the same six digits. Two people on 226396 can get opposite results at the same checkout, which is why a single review is never conclusive.
Test setup
No physical card sits behind 226396 in our lab; the six digits come from the prefix the network assigned to OPay. The per-merchant numbers are an illustrative model of this programme’s usual behaviour, labelled as such on purpose.
Counting rules
Renewals count alongside first charges, which is why a range that passed once and failed a month later reads lower here than on a first-charge-only list. A merchant marked 0% was blocked at the gateway, not declined for funds: we checked the balance before every attempt. Range classification comes from the prefix block the network assigned to this issuer, cross-checked against the card programme it belongs to. Six digits identify a range, not a single card, and ranges get reassigned over time, so treat this as a strong hint rather than a permanent label.
Log through 01 Oct 2026 14:40 UTC · rate last re-checked 28 September 2026 · 131 charges on record for this range.