Digital wallets are now the most common way to pay online in the UK, taking 40% of e-commerce spending in 2025 (Worldpay), ahead of credit and debit cards, and projected to reach 50% by 2030. The real story is a measurement one: there is no clean, single figure for "mobile payments" across all spending, because in-store phone taps are bundled into contactless. We use the figures that are actually published, and say what each one covers.
The online wallet share, where it is heading, and the in-store contactless figure that includes phone taps.
By payment method, the UK online checkout in 2025 was led by digital wallets, with cards split into credit and debit behind them.
| Method | Share of UK e-commerce |
|---|---|
| Digital wallets (Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal) | 40% |
| Credit cards | 23% |
| Debit cards | 22% |
| Buy now, pay later | 8% |
| Account-to-account | 6% |
| Other | 2% |
Most wallet payments are still cards underneath; the wallet is the way the card is presented. So a 40% wallet share does not mean cards are fading, it means the card is increasingly tokenised inside a phone. For the full online mix, see UK e-commerce statistics; for BNPL specifically, see UK BNPL statistics.
In physical shops, phone taps and card taps are counted together. There is no published split, so the in-store mobile share has to be inferred, not stated.
When you tap a phone at a terminal, UK Finance records it as a contactless payment, the same category as a physical contactless card. Contactless was 39% of all UK payments in 2024, but that figure mixes plastic and phones. UK Finance does not publish a separate mobile-wallet share of all payments, so anyone quoting one is either estimating or borrowing an online-only figure and applying it too broadly.
The honest position is that mobile wallets are clearly a large and growing share of in-store taps, but the exact split is not measured in the public data. We report the online figure, which is published, and flag the in-store gap rather than invent a number to fill it.
Whether you sell online or in person, supporting wallets is now table stakes. The cost still follows the card inside the wallet.
This is the heart of the page. Different sources measure different things, and forcing them into one number is where mobile-payment statistics go wrong.
The 40% is digital wallets as a share of online spending (Worldpay). The 39% is contactless as a share of all payments (UK Finance), which includes plastic cards as well as phones. The 50% is a forecast for online wallets by 2030. None of these is "the UK mobile payment share", and they are not comparable with each other. Quoting one as if it were the others is the most common error in this area.
Online payment-method shares come from Worldpay's Global Payments Report; the all-payments contactless figure from UK Finance, which bundles mobile wallet taps into contactless.
| Source | Publisher | Period covered | Type | Last checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Global Payments Report | Worldpay | 2025 data | Industry participant | 29 Apr 2026 |
| UK Payment Markets Report | UK Finance | 2024 (calendar year) | Industry body | 29 Apr 2026 |
The 40% digital wallet share, the card and BNPL splits and the 2030 projection come from Worldpay's Global Payments Report, a major processor's industry benchmark.
The 39% all-payments contactless figure comes from UK Finance. We state explicitly that it includes physical cards as well as phones, because UK Finance does not split mobile out.
We do not combine the online, in-store and forecast figures into one "mobile payments" percentage, because they measure different things over different windows.
Online shares map to Worldpay; the contactless figure to UK Finance and is labelled as including plastic cards. The 2030 figure is labelled a projection, and no single cross-channel "mobile payments" percentage is asserted. Last full review: 29 Apr 2026.