Walmart Is Finally Adding Apple Pay After More Than a Decade of Holding Out

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More Ways to Pay: Tap to Pay Is Coming to Walmart and Sam's Club

Walmart is finally adding tap-to-pay to its U.S. stores.

Beginning August 24, select Walmart and Sam's Club locations will start accepting contactless cards, phones and watches. The company plans to have it in every U.S. Walmart and Sam's Club by the end of 2026, with fuel stations following by mid-2027.

That means Apple Pay and Google Pay will finally work at Walmart.

This shouldn't feel like a major technology announcement in 2026.

It does because Walmart has spent more than a decade deliberately resisting it.

Apple Pay launched in 2014. Walmart wasn't merely slow to install compatible terminals. For years it refused NFC payments entirely. You couldn't use Apple Pay, Google Pay or even tap a physical contactless credit card at a U.S. Walmart register.

The history goes back to CurrentC.

Walmart was one of the major retailers behind the Merchant Customer Exchange, or MCX, which started developing its own mobile payment system before Apple Pay existed. CurrentC avoided NFC and instead used QR codes, with the original idea of connecting customers more directly to checking and debit accounts and reducing the interchange fees retailers paid to the card networks.

When Apple Pay arrived, several MCX retailers went so far as to disable NFC payments that their terminals had previously supported.

CurrentC never really went anywhere. Its accounts were shut down in 2016.

Walmart went in another direction and launched Walmart Pay nationwide that same year.

It still used QR codes.

You open the Walmart app, bring up Walmart Pay and scan the QR code at the register. It works, but it requires the customer to participate in Walmart's payment system rather than simply use the payment wallet already built into their phone or watch.

Walmart remained remarkably committed to that strategy.

As recently as January 2025, a Walmart spokesperson reiterated that the company had no plans to support NFC payments and was instead focused on Walmart Pay and Scan & Go.

Even at the beginning of 2026, Walmart was still one of the last major U.S. retailers holding out while Home Depot, Lowe's, Kroger, H-E-B and others had already moved to contactless payments.

There was never really a technical reason Walmart couldn't do it either.

Walmart stores in Canada have accepted Apple Pay since 2020.

That is what makes today's announcement interesting.

Walmart isn't replacing Walmart Pay. It is finally accepting that its own payment system doesn't need to exclude everybody else's.

Customers who like Walmart Pay can keep using it. Sam's Club members can keep using Scan & Go. People carrying a contactless card can tap it. Someone wearing an Apple Watch can use Apple Pay.

That is how payment systems should work.

I don't want every retailer to require its own app, account and proprietary checkout process just so I can give them money.

There is also a privacy difference here that has always bothered me.

Apple Pay uses tokenized device-specific account numbers rather than handing the merchant the actual card number used to provision the wallet. Walmart Pay, by design, lives inside Walmart's own application and is tightly integrated with purchases, receipts and the rest of the customer's Walmart account.

Walmart has never said that customer tracking was the reason it resisted Apple Pay, so I don't think it is fair to state that as fact.

But controlling the payment experience clearly gave Walmart a much tighter relationship with the transaction and the customer than simply accepting an NFC payment.

Now customers finally get to choose.

The funny thing is how ordinary this announcement will eventually become.

A year from now someone will tap an iPhone at a Walmart register and probably never think about it.

It took Walmart almost twelve years to get there.