UK Apple Pay users will soon be able to spend £100 without their cards

Paying with Apple Pay
Paying with Apple Pay (Image credit: Pexels)

What you need to know

  • UK Apple Pay users will soon be able to spend £100 contact-free.
  • The current contactless limit is £45.
  • Some stores don't have a limit at all, however.

Users of Apple Pay in the UK will soon be able to spend as much as £100 without needing their card after it was announced that the increase will take place from October 15. The previous contactless limit was £45.

While some stores, like Apple Stores, don't impose any limit on Apple Pay transactions, the majority of retailers treat them as any other contactless payment. That means that the limit is the same as paying using a contactless card, despite the biometrics involved with Apple Pay, Touch ID, and Face ID.

It's now been confirmed that the current £45 limit will increase to £100 in two months.

The national roll-out of the new £100 spending limit for contactless card payments will begin from 15 October 2021, UK Finance announces today.The decision to raise the contactless limit from £45 to £100 was made by HM Treasury and the Financial Conduct Authority following a public consultation and in discussion with both the retail and banking sectors. It follows on from the successful increase in the limit from £30 to £45 in April 2020.

That increase from £30 to £45 was originally rolled out in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing more contactless payments to be made in an attempt to cut down transmission of the virus.

This of course doesn't change anything about how people will buy iPhone 13 and other products in Apple Stores next month — Apple Stores have always allowed payments well in excess of £100 when using Apple Pay.

Apple is set to announce the new iPhone lineup at some point next month, believed to be September 14. Despite a relatively small number of changes, iPhone 13 will undoubtedly be the best iPhone yet.

Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.