Walmart said Friday it will accept Apple Pay, Google Pay and other contactless payments at its US stores, ending a holdout that has kept tap-to-pay off its registers for more than a decade.
The Big Picture
- Walmart starts its tap-to-pay rollout on August 24 at a limited set of Walmart and Sam’s Club locations.
- Apple Pay already reaches about 85% of US retailers, a gap that left Walmart an outlier among large national chains.
- Walmart Pay and Sam’s Club Scan & Go both stay in place, so the QR code checkout flow does not disappear.
- Fuel stations attached to Walmart and Sam’s Club sites will not take contactless payments until mid-2027.
- Shoppers can load Walmart, Sam’s Club and OnePay cards into Apple and Google digital wallets under the change.
Walmart opens its checkout lanes to Apple Pay and Google Pay
The rollout starts August 24 at a group of stores and clubs Walmart has not named, and the company wants every US store and club covered by the end of 2026. Shoppers will be able to tap a contactless card, phone or smartwatch at the terminal instead of scanning a QR code through the Walmart Pay app.
Walmart framed the switch as an addition rather than a replacement. “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 change covers Walmart’s website and mobile app as well as its physical stores. Customers will also be able to load eligible Walmart, Sam’s Club and OnePay cards into their digital wallets, which puts Walmart’s own payment credentials inside the wallets it spent ten years keeping at arm’s length.
Walmart has announced that it will finally begin accepting Apple Pay and other tap-to-pay options at select U.S. locations starting Monday, August 24 🚨
— Apple Hub (@theapplehub) August 21, 2026
The company plans to roll out support to all of its U.S. stores by the end of 2026 pic.twitter.com/d24adrzDbE
A decade of resistance, from CurrentC to the 85% gap
Walmart spent the mid-2010s inside a coalition of major US retailers backing CurrentC, a rival mobile payment venture built explicitly to challenge Apple Pay at the checkout counter. That project never gained traction and shut down in 2016, and Walmart kept refusing Apple’s platform for years afterward while competitors adopted it broadly. Apple Pay now sits at roughly 85% acceptance across US retailers, according to figures cited by Axios, and Apple Pay adoption data puts the scale of what Walmart was declining into context.
The company’s own tools survive the change. Walmart Pay stays the house digital wallet and Sam’s Club keeps Scan & Go, so the QR flow that regular shoppers already use will keep running alongside the tap terminals.
What Walmart has not said?
Walmart’s statement confirms the capability and the start date. It does not establish that every terminal inside a first-wave store will accept a tap on day one, and the company has not addressed that question either way. Four gaps stay open:
- Which Walmart stores and Sam’s Club locations are in the first wave, and in which cities?
- How the rollout will be sequenced across thousands of locations before the year-end target?
- Whether tap-to-pay arrives at self-checkout kiosks, staffed lanes or both at launch?
- Why fuel pumps sit on a later timeline than in-store terminals under the same plan?
Why It Matters?
Checkout friction carries a real cost for a retailer that competes on convenience, and Walmart removed a source of it one day after reporting the slowest growth in comparable US sales in more than six years, a slowdown tied in part to pricing pressure inside its pharmacy business. The timing is suggestive, though Walmart has not connected the two, and the payment announcement arrived without any reference to the quarter. Shoppers who already rely on Walmart Pay or Scan & Go need to change nothing; both keep working, and anyone hoping to tap at a Walmart fuel pump should plan on waiting until mid-2027.
What’s next: Walmart has set two public checkpoints, the year-end target for stores and clubs and a later target for fuel stations, and neither carries an interim milestone. Watch for the first wave store list, which the company still has not published, and for whether OnePay card provisioning in Apple Wallet goes live alongside terminal acceptance. Anyone using the Walmart Pay QR flow purely because nothing else worked should check whether their store is in the opening group before assuming they can tap.
