Status of the card payment contingency measure in Denmark

In the event of an outage in the card payment infrastructure, or if the internet is down, all adults in Denmark with a Danish-issued payment card from Dankort, Mastercard or Visa can now make offline payments in most nationwide supermarket chains for at least a week. This applies both to their physical payment cards and to card-based wallets on their mobile phones, such as Apple Pay and Google Pay. The same will be the case at 40 per cent of pharmacies in June, and the remaining pharmacies during the third quarter of 2026. This means that the Danish Payments Council will have achieved its objective of establishing a nationwide card payment contingency measure. The resilience of payments in Denmark is further supported by the fact that 80 per cent of Danes have at least one payment card that can be used offline in most stores not covered by the contingency measure.