How to Pay in China (2026): Alipay, WeChat Pay, Cards

Pay ¥199 for lunch with a foreign card in WeChat Pay and the lunch costs ¥199. Pay ¥250 for dinner and WeChat Pay adds 3% of the whole bill, ¥7.50, because the fee-free line stops at ¥200 (about $30 or £22). That one rule is most of what a visitor needs to know about the apps: add your Visa or Mastercard to WeChat Pay and Alipay before you leave home, then pay by scanning or showing a QR code, the way people in China pay at shop counters, cafés and street stalls. Carry a contactless card and some cash as back-up, and you’re ready for most of what you’ll pay for in the big cities.

The card inside these apps is for buying things, not for moving money: no red packets, no transfers to the friend who paid for dinner. Everything else below is about getting the set-up right and knowing where the apps stop.

WeChat Pay: the set-up at home

WeChat Pay, which calls itself Weixin Pay in its help pages, is the one to set up first, because its help centre lists every step for international cards:

1. Install or update WeChat and register with your phone number.
2. Go to Me, then Pay and Services, then Wallet.
3. Tap Bank Cards, then Add a Bank Card, accept the agreement and enter your identity details. With a passport, you’ll be asked to upload a copy of it.

You don’t need a Chinese (+86) number. Any international number works, as long as it can receive the SMS verification codes. A new WeChat account may be asked for extra verification: WeChat’s help pages offer a QR scan by an existing WeChat user or “Verify via Payment Card”, and ask you to disconnect from any VPN while you register. Do it at home on Wi-Fi, a week before you fly, so that a card your bank flags as unusual can be sorted out with a phone call in your time zone.

Once the card is in, you pay in two ways: scan the shop’s QR code and type the amount, or open your payment code and let the cashier scan it. The exchange rate is set by your card scheme and your bank, not by WeChat, so a card without a foreign transaction fee is worth using here too.

Alipay: a second wallet that works the same way

Alipay’s agreement allows sign-up with a non-Chinese passport. You add a card in the app, and before your first card payment it asks for your passport details; after that you scan or show a code exactly as with WeChat. The card works for purchases from merchants in mainland China, which excludes Hong Kong and Macao.

Why bother with both? Because a shop may display only one of the two codes, and because a card that one app declines can go through on the other. Alipay also opens the metro QR codes in Beijing and Shanghai. What the wallets do beyond paying, from translation to ride-hailing, is covered in our China travel apps rundown.

The ¥200 line: what the apps charge and cap

Here’s what WeChat Pay publishes for international cards:

• Fee: none on a single payment of ¥200 or less; above ¥200, a 3% fee on the whole payment, not just on the part over the line. Tenpay, the company behind WeChat Pay, set this out in an announcement of 15 January 2026, and the fee is shown on the payment page before you confirm. If a payment is refunded, the fee comes back in proportion.
• Limits: WeChat Pay’s help page lists ¥6,500 per payment (about $970 or £730), ¥50,000 a month and ¥65,000 a year; Tencent says passport-verified users can go up to US$5,000 a payment (about ¥33,600) and US$50,000 a year. Check the payment page for the limit on your own account.
• Not available: red packets, money transfers and some other features.

Because the fee applies to the whole amount, the line works like a step rather than a slope. A ¥200 bill costs nothing extra; a ¥201 bill carries ¥6.03 in fees. When a group dinner lands over the line and the restaurant takes separate payments, paying your shares in separate scans keeps each payment smaller, and any share of ¥200 or less carries no fee.

Alipay’s own 2023 guide to foreign cards set the same rule: free under ¥200, 3% above, refunded if the payment is. We found no current Alipay page restating it, and its card agreement says fees are shown on the payment page, so read the screen before you confirm anything large.

WeChat Pay has also run fee waivers for people adding a foreign card for the first time. The terms change, so treat any saving as a bonus and check the fee line on the payment page rather than counting on it.

If a large payment is declined in the app, a hotel bill at checkout for example, that’s the moment to hand over a bank card instead.

Where a bank card still works on its own

You can get further with a plain contactless card than the “China is cashless” stories suggest. Under a 2024 circular led by the People’s Bank of China, tourist hotels of three stars and above, the 4A and 5A-rated attractions and national tourist resorts are expected to accept foreign bank cards, and the big attractions are told to keep staffed ticket booths. Online, the Palace Museum’s booking site takes international bank cards too; our Forbidden City tickets guide walks through the booking.

The metro is the other big one. In Beijing every gate now takes contactless UnionPay, Visa, Mastercard, JCB and American Express cards, the last two since June 2025. In Shanghai the same five work at the gates if your card allows small payments without a PIN, and every station’s service centre has a card terminal for tickets. The Beijing and Shanghai guides have the fares.

Big bills are where a card earns its place: a hotel deposit, a museum shop splurge, anything an app declines. Small ones are where the apps win, because the corner shop or the dumpling stall won’t have a card terminal at all.

Cash after the February 2026 rules

Cash got a legal boost in 2026. Since 1 February, rules from the People’s Bank of China and two other regulators bar businesses from refusing renminbi notes and coins wherever a person takes the money: at a staffed till, in any face-to-face service, and when an online order is handed over in person. They’re also told to keep enough change. Self-service machines have to offer a way to pay cash when a phone payment fails.

So a stack of notes is a legitimate plan B, not a relic. You can draw yuan from ATMs that show your card network’s logo, or change money at bank branches with a currency exchange sign. Outside the major cities, the UK Foreign Office warns, cards aren’t always accepted and ATMs are limited, and counterfeit notes, especially hundred-yuan ones, turn up even from cash machines, so check what you’re given before you walk away.

What cash won’t do is turn a phone-only machine into a till. Vending machines and self-service kiosks are built around QR codes, and the rules ask them for a way to pay cash in special cases, not for a cashier at every machine.

Train tickets, hospital deposits and SMS codes

The set-up codes from WeChat, Alipay and your bank arrive by SMS, so the number you registered has to stay reachable in China; the eSIM explainer covers how to keep it on alongside a data plan.

Trains are simpler than people expect. A 2025 official guide for foreign business people says 12306, China Railway’s own platform, takes Chinese and foreign bank cards as well as mobile payment apps online, so the wallet set-up above isn’t a precondition for a train ticket. Where to book is a separate question, settled in the 12306 vs Trip.com comparison.

Hospitals are the payment to think about before you need one. The UK Foreign Office notes that many don’t accept foreign cards for the deposit they ask for before treatment, while many do take Alipay and WeChat Pay. The insurance section of our China visa guide has the figures.

A fallback kit for the day your phone dies

Phones get lost, batteries die and cards get blocked by a cautious bank. Pack for that day:

• Two apps, two cards. Put a Visa in one wallet and a Mastercard in the other, or both cards in both, so a single decline doesn’t stop you.
• A contactless card in your pocket, for the metro gates in Beijing and Shanghai, hotels and the big sights.
• Some cash, kept apart from your phone, for a staffed till that can’t take your card.
• A power bank. Every payment method above except cash and the card runs on your phone’s battery.
• Your bank’s overseas number saved offline, because the one-time code you need to unblock a card arrives by text.

Set all of it up at home. Your first meal in China should take two taps to pay for, not an identity check on a café’s Wi-Fi.