This study examined the influence of microfinance loans on women empowerment in rural Uganda, with specific reference to Kyabugimbi Sub-County in Bushenyi District. Microfinance has been advanced for four decades as an instrument capable of simultaneously alleviating poverty and transforming gender relations, on the proposition that access to credit enables women to establish income-generating enterprises whose returns strengthen their bargaining position within households and communities. This proposition has been contested by scholarship arguing that credit access alone cannot dislodge structural gender inequalities, that loans may be appropriated by male household members, and that group liability can generate social pressure that constitutes a new burden rather than a source of solidarity. Kyabugimbi Sub-County, situated in a predominantly agrarian district of southwestern Uganda characterised by banana and coffee production, smallholder landholding, patrilineal inheritance, and an active landscape of savings and credit cooperatives and village savings and loan associations, provides an appropriate setting for testing these competing claims. The study adopted a positivist philosophy and a cross-sectional survey design, collecting data from 234 women microfinance clients selected through stratified random sampling from a target population of 590 across registered microfinance groups in the sub-county. A structured questionnaire administered through trained enumerators measured four microfinance loan dimensions, namely loan accessibility, loan size and adequacy, loan terms and conditions, and complementary services including training and group support, against women empowerment assessed through economic empowerment, household decision-making, social and community participation, and psychological empowerment and self-efficacy. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation, and multiple regression in SPSS version 26. Results showed that loan accessibility recorded the highest mean while loan size and adequacy recorded the lowest. All dimensions correlated significantly and positively with women empowerment, with complementary services strongest (r = 0.694, p < 0.01), followed by loan terms and