Walmart will start accepting Apple Pay and Google Pay at select Walmart stores and Sam’s Club locations on August 24, ending a long refusal to support tap-to-pay at its checkout lanes. The company said Friday that the change will spread to all stores and clubs by the end of the year, with fuel stations to follow by the middle of 2027.
The timing matters because shoppers have been asking for this for years, and because Walmart sits among the largest U.S. retailers still steering customers toward its own payment tools. That leaves the company making a sharp turn just as tap-to-pay has become routine in much of the market, where Apple Pay is now accepted at 85% of retailers across the U.S.
Walmart has long pushed its own payment systems, including Walmart Pay and Scan-and-Go, and once teamed with other big retailers on CurrentC, an alternative mobile payment system meant to take down Apple Pay. That effort failed and was shut down in 2016, leaving Walmart on the wrong side of a shift that kept moving without it.
Now Walmart is casting the change as a way to give customers and members more choice at checkout and to make managing and using their money easier. That is the clean public message. The harder question is why the company is changing course now, after years of resisting the very technology it is finally adopting.
For shoppers, the first sign will come in select stores and clubs on August 24, with a wider rollout to all locations by year-end. By the middle of 2027, even the fuel stations are supposed to be included, a slow finish for a feature that many customers have already treated as standard.
