Tap to Pay

Use Tap to Pay on iPhone to accept in-person contactless payments with a compatible iPhone.

Tap to Pay on iPhone includes support for Visa, Mastercard, American Express contactless cards, and NFC-based mobile wallets (Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay). PIN entry is supported in eligible markets. Additionally, Discover is supported in the US, Interac is supported in Canada, and eftpos is supported in Australia. Stripe includes Tap to Pay on iPhone in the Terminal iOS SDK and the Terminal React Native SDK, and enables payments directly in your iOS mobile app.

Availability

Availability in Public preview

Get started

Supported devices

Tap to Pay on iPhone requires an iPhone XS or later running:

• iOS 16.7 or later in the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom.

• iOS 17.0 or later in Austria, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, and Sweden.

• iOS 17.4 or later in Canada.

We recommend asking your users to update to the latest iOS version for the best performance.

Cardholder verification limits and fallback

Some contactless card transactions above certain amounts might require additional cardholder verification methods (CVM) such as PIN entry. Tap to Pay on iPhone supports PIN entry for devices running iOS 16.4+. NFC wallet payments (Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay) might not be subject to these same limits.

In the UK and Canada, there are specific considerations for contactless payments due to regional requirements and card issuer policies. In the UK, some cards might need to be inserted into a device to comply with Strong Customer Authentication requirements, which vary depending on the issuer. In such cases, the payment will be declined before the PIN screen appears, with the reason offline_pin_required.

Similarly, in Canada, the majority of issued cards are offline PIN only, meaning they require contact (for example, insertion into a device) to provide a PIN. Tap to Pay on iPhone doesn’t support offline PIN (only online PIN), which means any transaction over the CVM limit (250 CAD) for cards that only support offline PIN will be declined.

In these scenarios, we recommend instructing the customer to use a different card or another method to collect payment, such as a Terminal card reader or sending a Stripe Payment Link.

Best practices and promotion guidelines

Follow the Human Interface Guidelines for Tap to Pay on iPhone to ensure of an optimal user experience and successful review process with Apple.

Consider the following:

• Connect to the reader in the background on app startup to reduce wait times when collecting a payment.
• Use automatic reconnection to reconnect to the reader when the app comes to the foreground to reduce wait times.
• Provide merchant education to guide your users on how to accept contactless payments on a compatible iPhone, including in-product promotion and text or email alerts. See Apple’s developer marketing guidance. With iOS 18, you can use Apple’s ProximityReaderDiscovery API to provide merchant education for Tap to Pay on iPhone with a few lines of code. Apple ensures that the content is up to date and localized for your merchant’s region.
• Launch and promote your Tap to Pay on iPhone marketing campaigns using our messaging templates and design assets following Apple’s brand guidelines. Become a Stripe Partner here to access these assets in the partner portal.