Can You Get Cash Back With Apple Pay? Answered

Can You Get Cash Back With Apple Pay?

You can get cash back with Apple Pay — but there are a few conditions:

• You will need to link a debit card to your Apple Pay account
• The store must accept Apple Pay
• The store must offer cash back on purchases

We contacted Apple’s customer service department at (408) 996-1010 to find out about the Apple Pay cash-back policy. We were told that as long as the store takes Apple Pay, you should be able to get cash back.

To confirm this information, we contacted three companies that take Apple Pay (according to Apple’s guide on where to use Apple Pay) that we know offer cash back (according to our article on stores that give cash back). The stores we contacted were Albertsons locations in Arizona, California, and Idaho; Safeway locations in Colorado, Delaware, and Washington; and Trader Joe’s in Georgia, Florida, and Tennessee.

During our research, we found that some individual stores are not able to give cash back on Apple Pay purchases — even if other stores owned by the parent company offer cash back with Apple Pay. For example, while most of the Albertsons and Safeway stores we contacted said they offer cash back on Apple Pay purchases, some said they do not. An Albertsons store associate in Bakersfield, Calif., cited system limitations and a Safeway store manager in Rehoboth Beach, Del., said the store policy is to not allow cash back on Apple Pay transactions. All of the Trader Joe’s locations we contacted said they offer cash back on purchases made with Apple Pay.

Where you can get cash back with Apple Pay, your transaction should process like other cash-back purchases. Cash-back denominations and limits are set by the retailer; for example, Trader Joe’s limits all cash-back transactions to $50 — this also applies when you get cash back with Apple Pay. No fees are associated with cash back.

See our related research to find out whether you can use Apple Pay at an ATM.