Walmart will finally accept Apple Pay and Google Pay

Walmart said Friday it will finally accept payments via Apple Pay and Google Pay at its stores, including Walmart and Sam’s Club locations. The retailer says that beginning August 24, it will start adding Tap to Pay to its payment options at select Walmart stores and Sam’s Club locations, expects the feature to reach all stores and clubs by the end of the year, and will roll it out to all its fuel stations by the middle of 2027.

The move is a reversal for Walmart, which has long refused to adopt the now-ubiquitous payment technology in favor of promoting its own in-house solutions, like Walmart Pay and Scan-and-Go. In years past, Walmart even teamed up with other big retailers in an attempt to kill off Apple Pay entirely with a rival mobile payment system of their own, called CurrentC; the effort failed and was shut down in 2016. Meanwhile, Walmart customers have kept asking the company to support tap-and-pay technology like Apple Pay, which is now accepted at 85% of retailers across the U.S., including most larger stores.

For Walmart, the decision reads as a concession: as one of the world’s largest retailers, it believed it could push customers toward its own payment tools despite the growing adoption of Apple Pay and similar services, and it has now effectively acknowledged that holding out was disadvantaging its own customers. The company is framing the news as giving consumers more choice: “Tap to Pay is a great addition to the other payment options already offered like cash, credit card or Walmart Pay… And giving customers and members more choice at checkout is part of a broader effort to make managing and using their money easier,” the company said in its announcement.

Why it matters

When one of the world’s largest retailers drops years of resistance to Apple Pay and Google Pay, it closes one of the last major holdouts against tap-to-pay in U.S. retail — a sign of how dominant NFC payments have become at checkout everywhere else.