Walmart Ends 12-Year Apple Pay Holdout, Eyes OnePay Growth

Quick Facts

Walmart began accepting Apple Pay, Google Pay, and NFC contactless payments at select U.S. stores on Aug. 24, 2026, with a full rollout to all 4,600 Walmart and Sam’s Club locations by end of 2026.
Apple Pay was used in 10.2% of eligible in-store transactions in 2025, with an estimated $450 billion in annual in-store sales volume.
Walmart’s OnePay fintech app has 6 million monthly active users and roughly $50 billion in annualized payments, and can now be added to Apple Wallet.

Walmart is accepting Apple Pay and Google Pay for the first time, ending a 12-year refusal that made the world’s largest retailer one of the most visible gaps in America’s contactless payment map. The rollout began Aug. 24 at select stores and will reach all approximately 4,600 Walmart and Sam’s Club locations by the end of 2026. Fuel stations will follow by mid-2027.

Customers can pay using contactless cards, phones, or smartwatches. The options are also available on Walmart’s websites and apps.

Walmart’s resistance was never a technology problem. The company’s point-of-sale terminals have carried NFC hardware for years. Walmart deliberately disabled those radios to push shoppers toward Walmart Pay, its proprietary QR-code-based payment app. Former CurrentC consortium members, including Walmart, were vague about their objections to Apple and Google’s systems, but analysts long suspected customer data was the core issue.

The reversal comes amid real financial pressure. Walmart’s U.S. comparable sales rose just 2.6% last quarter, well below the 3.8% analysts expected. Weak earnings guidance in May triggered the company’s worst single-day stock drop since 2023, and the stock later fell nearly 9% after same-store sales again missed expectations.

Consumer behavior added more pressure. The share of U.S. consumers making mobile payments at the register more than doubled between 2021 and 2025. Digital wallets accounted for 11.8% of in-store payments in 2025, nearly matching cash. A 2025 social media post by comedian Kevin Fredericks mocking Walmart’s refusal to accept Apple Pay was viewed more than four million times in under 24 hours.

Payment analyst Aaron Press of IDC said it plainly: “Consumers used to the ease of paying with a tap are annoyed when they can’t use contactless.”

Walmart framed the move around customer choice. “It all comes back to giving customers and members more choice and making everyday shopping a little easier — from how they manage their money to how they pay at checkout,” the company said in a statement.

The strategic logic goes beyond checkout convenience. Walmart structured the NFC rollout so that eligible OnePay cards can be added to Apple Wallet, placing Walmart’s financial products inside an ecosystem that reaches more than 70 million U.S. users. OnePay, Walmart’s majority-owned fintech, offers credit and debit cards, a high-yield savings account, buy now pay later loans through Klarna, peer-to-peer payments, cryptocurrency trading, and wireless phone plans. The company has built it as a broad consumer finance platform, and Apple’s distribution now becomes a recruitment channel for it.

OnePay currently has 6 million monthly active users and about $50 billion in annualized payments. Adding Apple Wallet access gives the product a path to a substantially larger audience without requiring shoppers to download a separate app first.

American Banker reported that Walmart likely found a way to route debit transactions through Apple Pay and Google Pay to minimize card network fees, addressing one of the original objections that drove the CurrentC experiment. CurrentC, the QR-code system backed by Walmart and other large retailers, suffered a data breach before launching publicly and shut down in 2016. Rather than pivot to NFC at that point, Walmart built Walmart Pay. It held that position even through the COVID-era surge in contactless payment adoption, while Walmart Canada supported Apple Pay and Google Pay for debit since 2020.

Walmart Pay, cash, and traditional cards remain available. Sam’s Club members retain access to Scan and Go, which lets shoppers pay through the app without a conventional checkout line.