Walmart will start accepting Apple Pay, Google Pay and other contactless tap to pay methods at its US checkouts from Monday 24 August, ending more than a decade of resistance to NFC payments at the largest retailer in the country. The company announced on 21 August 2026 that shoppers will be able to pay with an eligible contactless card, phone or smartwatch at select Walmart stores and Sam’s Club locations from that date, with all US stores of both banners covered by the end of 2026 and fuel stations following by the middle of 2027.
Walmart framed the change as a matter of choice rather than a reversal. “We want customers and members to have choice in how they pay, so they can check out in the way that works best” for them, the company said in its announcement. The existing options all stay in place: cash, credit cards, Walmart Pay with its Walmart+ fuel savings, and Sam’s Club Scan & Go. Customers can also load eligible Walmart, Sam’s Club and OnePay cards into their digital wallets.
What is actually being switched on
Tap to pay runs on near field communication, a short range radio technology operating in the high frequency band at 13.56 MHz. The contactless bank cards already in most wallets are governed by ISO/IEC 14443, the proximity card standard that defines the air interface, the modulation and the anticollision procedure. Phones bring in ISO/IEC 18092, which covers NFC’s peer to peer and card emulation behaviour and allows a handset to present itself to a reader as though it were a card. Both sit on the same 13.56 MHz carrier, which is why a single read head at the till can serve a piece of plastic, an iPhone and a smartwatch without needing to care which is which.
The defining characteristic of the technology is its range. An NFC link works over a few centimetres, and that is a deliberate design choice rather than a limitation anyone is trying to engineer away. Coupling is inductive and near field, so the signal falls off steeply with distance, and the practical result is that a customer has to hold the device against the terminal to transact at all. A UHF RAIN RFID tag can be read across a room. A payment credential should not be, and the physics of the 13.56 MHz near field does a good deal of the security work before any cryptography gets involved.
The payment itself is EMV contactless, specified by EMVCo and implemented in the terminal as a set of contactless kernels, one per scheme, which handle the transaction flow once the radio link is established. NFC is the transport. EMV is the conversation carried over it. That distinction matters for understanding what Walmart has actually done here, because a terminal already running an EMV contactless kernel for tapped debit and credit cards is running most of the same stack a phone needs.
Tokenisation and the card number the retailer never sees
When a card is added to Apple Pay or Google Wallet, the wallet does not store the card number. The scheme’s tokenisation service issues a device specific token, known in the industry as a DPAN or device primary account number, bound to that particular handset and that particular card. The real funding PAN stays with the issuer and the token service provider. Every tap then generates a one time cryptogram, computed in the device’s secure element and unique to that transaction, so intercepting the exchange yields nothing that can be reused.
That is the mechanism behind the privacy point made in coverage of the announcement, that the actual card number is concealed during the transaction. It is not marketing language. The merchant’s systems receive a token and a cryptogram, and a captured token cannot be replayed on another device or typed into a website. For a retailer processing transaction volumes on Walmart’s scale, accepting tokens rather than raw PANs also reduces the amount of sensitive data moving through the estate.
The QR code Walmart preferred instead
Walmart Pay, built to keep payments inside Walmart’s own app, works optically. The customer opens the app, selects payment, and the terminal displays a QR code that the phone’s camera scans. It works, and it gave Walmart a direct channel to its customers along with the data that comes with it. But as a checkout interaction it asks considerably more of the shopper than a tap does. The app has to be open and on the right screen, the camera needs a clear line of sight to the terminal display, that display has to be bright enough and clean enough to resolve, and the camera needs a moment to focus and decode. Under harsh store lighting, with a scratched terminal screen or a phone dimmed by battery saver, every one of those steps gets slower.
A tap has none of those dependencies. The device needs proximity, not line of sight, and the transaction completes in a fraction of a second whether the phone is held flat, at an angle or inside a case. A few seconds of difference is trivial once and significant across millions of lane transactions a day.
MCX, CurrentC and the decade of resistance
Walmart’s position was never accidental. It was a driving member of the Merchant Customer Exchange, a consortium of large US retailers formed to build CurrentC, a mobile payment system designed explicitly as an alternative to Apple Pay and structured to keep merchants in control of the customer relationship and away from card scheme economics. MCX’s membership terms included exclusivity, and during 2014 and 2015 several members switched off the NFC acceptance already present in their terminals in order to honour them, most visibly at Rite Aid and CVS, which disabled contactless within weeks of Apple Pay’s launch. CurrentC never progressed beyond limited testing and was discontinued in 2016.
Walmart carried on regardless, promoting Walmart Pay and Scan & Go while contactless acceptance spread around it. Apple Pay is now accepted at around 85% of US retailers, and Home Depot, Lowe’s, Kroger and H-E-B took tap to pay long ago. Walmart was the conspicuous holdout. There was an awkward inconsistency inside its own estate, too, because Walmart Canada has accepted Apple Pay since 2020, which makes clear the objection in the US was strategic rather than technical.
That is also the strongest clue about the scale of the work involved. Walmart’s terminals have overwhelmingly carried contactless capable read heads for years, because the US market moved to EMV contactless card acceptance over that period, and the well founded industry read of this announcement is that it is largely a matter of enabling the NFC path and wallet acceptance in software and configuration rather than a hardware replacement programme. Walmart has not described the technical work involved, and the staged schedule, running more than a year before it reaches fuel sites, points to certification, testing and estate management rather than one switch being thrown.
Why Walmart’s scale moves the numbers
The market context explains the timing. Digital wallets accounted for 11.8% of consumers’ most recent in store payments in 2025, closing on cash at 12.1%, according to PYMNTS Intelligence. Mobile wallet in store usage reached 31% of consumers by late 2025, more than double the 14% recorded in 2024. Apple Pay was used for 10.2% of eligible in store transactions in 2025, up from 8.9% the year before, on estimated annual in store sales volume of $450 billion. These are survey and industry estimates rather than audited figures and should be read as directional.
Walmart’s absence has been quietly suppressing all of those percentages, because the denominator included an enormous number of transactions at which tapping was simply not an option. Adding the largest US retailer to the accepting side does two things at once. It lifts the share of eligible transactions mechanically, and it removes one of the last practical reasons for an American shopper to keep a physical card in reach out of habit. Google Pay, PayPal and Cash App stand to gain alongside Apple Pay. OnePay, whose cards Walmart is encouraging customers to load into wallets, has extended Apple Pay support to its CashRewards Card, with its Builder Card due to follow later in 2026.
For the contactless industry the notable part of this is not the technology, which has been settled and deployed for well over a decade, but the concession. Walmart bet that its own scale could push the US market towards a merchant controlled, QR based standard. The market went the other way, and the company has now accepted that holding the line was costing its own customers more than it was winning.
