Middle East oil producers are undertaking fundamental transformations of their rentier economies, including through new taxes and reductions in welfare subsidies that have supported citizens for generations. Reforms aimed at deficit reduction pose serious challenges for authoritarian states whose citizens are accustomed to generous financial patronage in return for political allegiance. However, a scarcity of reliable opinion data means that we know very little about how citizens view these changes, and how public opinion might serve to constrain or facilitate development toward a post-rentier society. This paper investigates public preferences towards fiscal reform in the quintessential rentier state of Qatar. We utilize two rare national surveys of Qatari citizens that assess preferences via novel choice experiments. Our results highlight the importance of perceived distributive equity in shaping public attitudes toward restructuring the rentier state. We find that rentier citizens have a strong preference for universal subsidies and a corresponding aversion to targeted benefits and elite discretionary and international spending. Notably, citizens also view the loss of existing subsidies as more problematic than the implementation of new forms of taxation. Finally, we identify a subset of older and poorer citizens who reject all approaches to fiscal reform.