Apple switched on Apple Pay in India on Wednesday 30th September 2026. When we first wrote about the plans nine days ago, Apple had said nothing and the launch was expected in October. It arrived just a day before October, and Apple’s announcement settles who can use it: people in India with an Axis Bank credit card on the Visa or Mastercard network.

Nobody else can add a card yet. If your credit card comes from HDFC Bank, SBI Card or ICICI Bank, the country’s three largest issuers, it won’t work with Apple Pay today. Neither will a debit card, or a card on RuPay, India’s home-grown card network, even one Axis issued. Apple has not said which bank comes next or when.

Axis Bank, India’s fourth-largest issuer, had 16.29 million credit cards outstanding at the end of August, out of 124.05 million across India, on figures from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). That puts about 13% of the country’s credit cards within reach of Apple Pay. The real number is lower, because Axis also issues RuPay credit cards, and neither Apple nor Axis gave a count of the cards that qualify. When we first wrote about it, we used July’s figure of 16.26 million.

You need an iPhone XR or newer running iOS 18 or later, or an Apple Watch Series 6 or newer on watchOS 11, paired with one of those iPhones. iPads work too. Apple says Mac support is “coming soon” but gives no date. You add the card in the Wallet app, or from the latest version of the Axis Bank app.

At a till, you double-click the side button, look at the phone for Face ID or use Touch ID, and hold the top of the iPhone near the card machine. The shop never receives your card number. Apple assigns the card a Device Account Number, a stand-in stored in the Secure Element, a separate chip inside the phone built to hold payment data, and that stand-in is what travels with the payment. Apple says it does not keep transaction details that can be traced back to you.

The part that is new for Indian cardholders is the missing one-time password. Digital payments in India need two factors of authentication, with a few exemptions, and banks have mostly used an SMS code as the second one. The RBI’s authentication directions, issued on 25th September 2025 and in force since 1st April 2026, list device-native biometrics as an accepted factor and let card issuers offer customers a choice. That is the rule that lets Face ID or Touch ID stand in for the SMS code. So an Axis cardholder buying in an app or on a website with Apple Pay confirms with their face or finger and skips the wait for an OTP.

Apple names Zomato, Blinkit, Croma, Tata 1mg, Ixigo, Reliance brands and its own Apple Stores among the places that take it, and says payment companies including Razorpay, PayU, Pine Labs, Paytm and Cashfree are switching it on for the shops they serve. In a physical shop, any card machine that takes contactless payments should work. Apple’s post gives two scales: one paragraph says Axis cardholders can pay at “thousands” of merchants, and a later one says Apple Pay will be accepted by “millions”.

Apple’s announcement does not mention UPI once. The Unified Payments Interface is the state-backed system that moves money straight from one bank account to another through QR codes and phone numbers, and it handled 84% of India’s digital retail payments in the National Payments Corporation of India’s 2025 report with BCG. For now, Apple Pay in India is a way to pay with a credit card, with no link to the system most Indians use when they pay digitally.

UPI is also moving onto the same card machines Apple Pay relies on. The RBI’s list of exemptions from the two-factor rule now includes tap-and-pay UPI payments on NFC card machines, added in a letter to the National Payments Corporation of India dated 2nd September 2026.

Apple’s own list of countries and regions that support Apple Pay still did not show India on the day of launch; the page is dated 9th September 2026. It still names four African countries, Egypt, Mauritius, Morocco and South Africa, and Kenya is not one of them. As we noted last week when Tap to Pay on iPhone reached 59 countries, Kenya would need a bank to issue cards that work in Apple Wallet before any of Apple’s payment services arrive here. India shows what Apple is willing to launch with: one bank, credit cards only, two card networks.

For Indian iPhone owners, today’s launch helps a narrow group. If you already hold an Axis Visa or Mastercard credit card, you get tap-to-pay on your phone and watch, and online checkouts without the OTP. Everyone else waits for a second bank, and the bank to watch is HDFC Bank, which issues more credit cards than any other lender in India. Until one of the three larger issuers signs, Apple Pay can reach at most about 13% of India’s credit cards, and none of its UPI payments.