Mastercard will require offline payments across Europe, with all newly issued cards enabled from February 2027 and all new and replacement terminals by May 2027, it said on October 8. During an outage, a chip-and-PIN payment can be approved locally up to €200, within a limit set by the cardholder's bank, and cleared once the connection returns.
Why it matters: Mastercard points to the April 2025 blackout in Spain and Portugal, when about 55 million people could not pay digitally, and says the capability already runs in Denmark, Sweden, Estonia and Latvia. Turning it into a scheme rule makes resilience part of the card networks' case in Europe, and Visa told heise that it also supports controlled offline transactions.
Source: Mastercard, October 8, 2026; heise online, October 9, 2026
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