Apple Pay Now Available in India With Axis Bank Cards

Tuesday September 29, 2026 5:01 pm PDT by Juli Clover

Apple Pay is now available in India, which means customers with an eligible card can add it to the Wallet app on iPhone and Apple Watch for contactless and online payments.

Apple Pay India
To use Apple Pay in India, users will need an Axis Bank credit card on the Visa or Mastercard network. Earlier today, TechCrunch reported that merchants and payment terminals will need to add Apple Pay support, so the service might not work at every contactless payment location.

RuPay, India's domestic card network, is not compatible with ‌Apple Pay‌. Major banks such as HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, and SBI Card have not added support either.

There have been rumors about ‌Apple Pay‌ expanding to India for about a decade, but regulatory issues made it difficult. India already has a popular digital payment option, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI). UPI is a state-backed payment system that allows funds to be transferred instantly between two bank accounts. UPI handles approximately 84 percent of India's digital transaction volume, and it does not work with ‌Apple Pay‌.

Related Roundup: Apple Pay

Tag: India

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Top Rated Comments

svish

3 weeks ago

Great to hear that it has finally launched in my country. Did not see any announcement on Apple Newsroom (India site). Will try adding my cards and see. Hopefully debit cards work too.

Score: 5 Votes (Like | Disagree)

iMacDragon

3 weeks ago

Can we have debit card from multiple countries added to the Apple wallet?

For eg: if the Apple ID is set to India, can we have an Apple Pay supported debit/credit card issued in another country added to the wallet?

As far as I'm aware card support isn't in any way tied to phone region - I have cards from UK and EU added

Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)

sydneysider88

3 weeks ago

This is good news - progress ! - but there probably is a very low number of merchants accepting Apple pay as of now, right ?

Well obviously nobody could accept it, if nobody could pay with it until now lol.

Apple Pay is not any different to contactless that we've been using for 20+ years so everyone's POS system automatically takes "Apple Pay".

Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)

magicvash

3 weeks ago

Last time I was in India, literally everybody from major stores to the guy chopping sugarcane on the street took PayTM. Contactless payments kind of worked, but if you had a foreign credit card, there were a bunch of terminals that would just refuse to accept foreign cards.

No support from the major banks and an established digital infrastructure for payments that isn’t Apple Pay…

Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)

Haiku_Oezu

2 weeks ago