What is the most used payment method in Ireland?
Contactless debit cards, increasingly through a phone. BPFI counted over 1.6 billion contactless payments worth more than €30 billion in 2025, 88.7% of all point-of-sale card payments, and 62.4% of those were made with a mobile wallet such as Apple Pay or Google Pay.
In detail
Contactless debit cards, increasingly through a phone. BPFI counted over 1.6 billion contactless payments worth more than €30 billion in 2025, 88.7% of all point-of-sale card payments, and 62.4% of those were made with a mobile wallet such as Apple Pay or Google Pay.
Payment by card in Ireland
Today almost every current account comes with one of the two, and credit cards are a smaller, mostly Visa and Mastercard, business. The Central Bank of Ireland counted 250 million card payments worth €9.31 billion in September 2026, with domestic online spending of €3.49 billion against €4.06 billion at domestic points of sale.
Payment by digital wallet and X-Pay in Ireland
Ireland is one of Europe's most phone-first markets at the till. Google launched Android Pay in Ireland in December 2016 and Apple Pay followed in March 2017; by 2025, 62.4% of contactless payments came from a mobile wallet, 159 phone or watch taps per person in a year. The ECB's SPACE study counts Ireland among the three euro area countries where mobile devices exceed 10% of point-of-sale transactions. Most of those taps are tokenized Visa and Mastercard debit cards, which is what X-Pay means in Ireland.
More detail in our #PayWorldTour guide Payment methods in Ireland.