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Shoppers may have to wait weeks for £30 contactless payment

Hundreds of thousands of payment terminals need to have their software updated before tap-and-go limit rises from £20 to £30

Contactless cards
In a major push to create a cashless society, all shops will by 2020 have to install so-called "contactless" terminals to continue taking card payments Credit: Photo: Alamy

Shoppers may have to wait weeks before being able to use a higher £30 limit on tap-and-go card payments in some shops because of the need to update hundreds of thousand of checkouts.

The purchase limit on contactless payment cards on Tuesday rises from £20 to £30 as their popularity has leapt in the first half of this year.

But it will be “a number of weeks” before all shops can accept the new limit because software in hundreds of thousands of card terminals needs to be updated, the UK Cards Association has admitted.

There are about 260,000 terminals owned by banks and others are owned by the shops themselves.

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The chance to make bigger purchases is likely to add to the popularity of the cards, which have seen strong growth in the past year.

Contactless payments were introduced in the UK in 2007 as an alternative to scrabbling around for cash to pay for low-value transactions, or fiddle around with a pin number.

There are 58 million contactless cards in the UK and industry figures show more contactless transactions took place during the first nine months of 2014 than the previous six years combined.

Contactless spending rose from £287 million in January 2015, to £567 million by June.

The new increase in purchase limit is the third to have taken place and puts contactless buying power just above the average card spend in a supermarket, pub or cinema.

Every retailer will have to offer tap-and-go payments within five years it was reported last week, in a move that could pave the way for the disappearance of the £5 "minimum spend" on cards in corner shops and pubs.

In a major push to create a cashless society, all shops will by 2020 have to install so-called "contactless" terminals to continue taking card payments.

Kevin Jenkins, UK managing director at Visa Europe, said contactless payment was becoming “the new normal”.

He said: “We’ve seen unprecedented growth in this area, with the number of Visa contactless transactions more than trebling in the past year in the UK.”