UK retailers back contactless limit rise as sales soar

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Aug 1, 2017

Many UK retailers are hoping that the spending limit per transaction for contactless credit and debit cards will be raised after transactions have surged.

A new report from Barclaycard showed that 75% of stores that offer contactless payments have seen transactions rising by 30% on average.

Contactless payments started in 2007, but while the transaction limit has been raised from £20 to £30 in recent years, it still means that larger baskets of goods or higher-priced individual items still have to be paid for using the chip and PIN process, with cash or with less widely-adopted systems such as paying via a smartwatch. All of these options take more time than a contactless card payment does.

Barclaycard said over half of retailers want an increase in the transaction limit with 20% thinking it should be raised to £100.

Almost 60% of Briton use contactless payments and 71% of this use it more often than a year ago. Barclaycard predicts that spending this way will rise 300% within four years.

Last month, debit cards became the the most widely used method of payment for transactions of £30 and under for the first time, largely driven by the contactless payments surge.

But almost half of all retailers still don’t offer contactless as a payment option.