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, and Discover contactless cards, NFC-based mobile wallets, and QR-based payment methods. PIN entry is supported. Additionally, eftpos is supported in Australia, Interac is supported in Canada, and Cartes Bancaires is supported in France. 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 requires an iPhone XS or later running a one-year or later iOS version. Apple’s Business Register documentation lists supported iOS versions. Advise 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 require additional cardholder verification methods (CVM) such as PIN entry. Tap to Pay on iPhone supports PIN entry for devices running iOS 16.4 or later.

NFC wallet payments (Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay) usually don’t require a PIN. However, in the UK, Canada, and Finland, regional requirements and card issuer policies can affect contactless payments.

In the UK, depending on the issuer, Strong Customer Authentication might require some cards to be inserted into a device. In such cases, if the card isn’t inserted, the payment is declined before the PIN screen appears, with the reason offline_pin_required.

In Canada and Finland, many issued cards are offline PIN only, meaning that entering the PIN requires physical contact, such as insertion into a device, which isn’t supported with Tap to Pay.

In these scenarios, we recommend asking the customer to try a different card or collecting payment in a different way. For example, using a Terminal card reader or sending a Payment Link.

When collecting payment with your mobile device, hold the card to the reader until it reads the chip information. You might need to wait a few seconds after the initial vibration when the card makes contact. In the event of a decline, use another method to collect payment, such as a Terminal card reader. You can only have one active connection to a reader at a time.

To test PIN entry in markets where PIN is accepted, use physical test cards with amounts ending in .03. In markets where PIN isn’t accepted, a transaction ending in .03 returns an online_or_offline_pin_required error code after the card is tapped, instead of allowing the user to test PIN entry.

Merchant education

Use Apple’s ProximityReaderDiscovery API to display this overlay directly in your app. No additional dependencies are required because ProximityReader is a built-in iOS system framework already linked by the Stripe Terminal SDK.

The API follows a two-step pattern described in Apple’s documentation:

1. Call content(for:) to fetch the educational content.
2. Call presentContent(_:from:) to display it.

func showHowToTap(from rootViewController: UIViewController) async throws {
    guard #available(iOS 18.0, *) else {
        // Provide your own fallback merchant education UI for earlier versions
        return
    }
    let discovery = ProximityReaderDiscovery()
    let content = try await discovery.content(for: .payment(.howToTap))

    // Walk the presentedViewController chain to find the topmost view controller
    var topVC = rootViewController
    while let presented = topVC.presentedViewController {
        topVC = presented
    }
    discovery.presentContent(content, from: topVC)
}

Keep two integration requirements in mind:

• Wrap the call in a #available(iOS 18.0, *) guard and provide a fallback UI for earlier versions.
• Pass the topmost presented view controller at the time of the call. Walk the presentedViewController chain from your root view controller to find it, otherwise the call fails.

Apple ensures that the content is up to date and localized for your business’s region. For additional merchant education strategies, including in-product promotion and text or email alerts, see Apple’s developer marketing guidance.

Best practices and promotion guidelines

Follow the guidelines in Tap to Pay on iPhone to ensure 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.
• 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 to access these assets in the partner portal.