Mastercard to Require Offline Payments on New European Cards From February 2027

Mastercard said it will make offline payments standard on all newly issued Mastercard credit and debit cards in Europe from February 2027, according to watch.impress.co.jp. Under the same plan, every new or renewed payment terminal in Europe must support offline payments by May 2027.

Offline transactions under the scheme are capped at a floor limit of 200 euros per transaction. Once network connectivity is restored, the stored transactions are cleared in a batch.

The move builds on the EU's NIS2 Directive, which took effect in January 2023, and the DORA regulation, which took effect in January 2025. Mastercard has been running pilot offline payment programs with central banks and major banks in Denmark, Sweden, Estonia and Latvia.

Interest in resilience has grown since April 2025, when a large-scale power outage in Spain and Portugal left an estimated 55 million people unable to use digital payments. This summer, a storm caused a large-scale power outage in central Latvia that cut communications infrastructure including mobile base stations, though stores with their own power generation could still accept card payments.

IC chips have included offline payment functions since they were introduced more than 20 years ago, but Zero Floor Limit operation has largely kept offline payments unused. Visa, meanwhile, has promoted Zero Floor Limit online transactions, and industry body EMVCo maintains the IC chip specifications.