How to Use Alipay as a Foreigner in China — 2026 Guide

The 2026 setup, start to finish

About 15 minutes when nothing glitches — and every step works from your home country, which is exactly where you should do it.

1. 1
   Download the one Alipay app

   There is no separate ‘international’ app — get Alipay from the App Store or Google Play, and registering with a foreign number switches it to international mode automatically.
2. 2
   Register with your home number

   Sign up with your home-country mobile number and confirm the SMS code — no Chinese phone number is needed at any point, and the UI switches to English.
3. 3
   Bind your foreign card

   Go to Account → Bank Cards → Add, then enter the card number, expiry, CVV, and the billing name exactly as your issuer has it on file.
4. 4
   Approve your bank’s check

   Binding triggers a small authorization hold, so keep your banking app open to approve the 3-D Secure prompt or fraud alert the moment it appears.
5. 5
   Set your payment PIN

   Choose the 6-digit PIN that will confirm every payment — pick something you can type fast at a busy counter.
6. 6
   Verify your passport

   Under Identity Verification, select the passport option, photograph the photo page so the machine-readable zone is glare-free, then pass the selfie liveness check.
7. 7
   Finish before you fly

   Approval is usually instant to 30 minutes (occasionally up to 24 hours), so complete everything on stable home internet rather than airport Wi-Fi after landing.
8. 8
   Scan your first QR

   Once in China, test the system on something small — a convenience-store water, a coffee — before trusting it with a restaurant bill.

Tour Pass is dead. Here’s the timeline, so old guides stop confusing you

This deserves its own section because it’s the single biggest source of confusion in the search results. Tour Pass launched in 2019 as a prepaid, closed-loop mini-wallet: you loaded money onto a Bank of Shanghai prepaid card inside Alipay and spent that balance. It was a workaround for an era when foreign cards couldn’t connect to Alipay at all.

That era ended in July 2023, when Alipay and WeChat Pay jointly opened direct foreign-card binding ahead of the Chengdu FISU Games and Hangzhou Asian Games — and in August 2023 Alipay shipped a proper international experience in the main app, with an English UI, a built-in translation tool, and a services portal for visitors. The prepaid model became redundant overnight. Tour Pass was deprecated; its renamed successor, TourCard (the same Bank of Shanghai prepaid mechanism), lingered on for holdouts, with new sign-ups closing off through 2026 as part of a gradual wind-down — travelers report new applications failing or being redirected to UnionPay’s Nihao China. Existing TourCard accounts can reportedly still top up, spend, and get refunds — but don’t plan a trip around opening one: the old prepaid terms carried a service fee of around 5% per top-up.

Confusingly, Alipay never published a clear ‘it’s gone’ notice — the old Tour Pass service agreement still sits live on an Alipay domain, which is why zombie guides keep citing it. Treat any page that walks you through Tour Pass or TourCard as stale on arrival.

Three product generations, one survivor

What you need — and what you don’t

The full requirements list is short: your passport, a card on a supported network, and a home-country phone number that can receive SMS. That’s it. You do not need a Chinese phone number, a Chinese bank account, a local address, or anyone in China to vouch for you.

The phone number deserves one caveat that catches travelers constantly: the SMS codes keep coming after setup — from Alipay occasionally, and from your bank’s 3-D Secure system every time a payment needs approval. Those bank codes go to your home number. If you land in China on a data-only travel eSIM with your home SIM removed, the codes arrive at a SIM sitting in a drawer at home. Keep the home SIM active in a dual-SIM setup with roaming SMS on, and run your data on the eSIM alongside it — our best eSIM for China guide covers the pairing.

Which cards bind in 2026

Six international networks bind: Visa, Mastercard, JCB, Discover, Diners Club International, and American Express. Visa and Mastercard are the mainstream path and the best-tested; JCB, Discover, and Diners work but show up in fewer traveler reports.

American Express is the newest full member — Amex and Alipay announced global linking in February 2025, with Amex becoming the first foreign network licensed to clear RMB in China through its local joint venture and its network of Chinese partner banks. You’ll find older claims that Amex ‘worked’ back in 2023; that earlier support was limited, which is why reports from before 2025 contradict each other. Post-2025 Amex binding is legitimate — but if Amex is your only card, pack a Visa or Mastercard backup anyway, since it has the shortest track record of the six.

What matters more than the logo on the card: it should be a physical personal card (virtual and disposable numbers are frequently rejected), enrolled in 3-D Secure, from a bank you’ve told about your China trip. When binding fails, the cause is almost always bank-side, not app-side — our China payment troubleshooting guide has the full card-compatibility table and the fix hierarchy.

Passport verification, without the retry loop

Card binding gets you a working wallet for small spending, but passport verification is what unlocks the real limits — and it’s the step most likely to reject a careless first attempt. The path in the app: Account → Settings → Account & Security → Identity Verification, then select the non-mainland resident option and choose passport as your document.

The app photographs your passport’s photo page and OCR-reads the machine-readable zone, then runs a selfie liveness check — blink, turn your head. Approval is usually instant to 30 minutes, occasionally up to 24 hours. The common rejection causes are mundane: glare on the laminate over the MRZ, a name entered differently from the passport (middle names and hyphens included — the billing name, passport name, and profile name should all align), the wrong document type selected, or a selfie in bad light. Fix the specific cause and retry once rather than hammering the button — repeated failures trigger extra review.

The ¥200 fee rule, in real numbers

Alipay’s foreign-card fee structure has one threshold and one trap. Transactions of ¥200 or less carry no Alipay service fee. Above ¥200, a 3% fee applies — and here’s the trap — to the entire amount, not just the portion above the threshold. WeChat Pay uses the same structure, so switching apps doesn’t dodge it. What it looks like in practice:

The fee your bank adds on top

Alipay’s 3% isn’t the whole cost picture. Every transaction is denominated in CNY and converted by your card issuer, so whatever foreign-transaction fee your card normally charges — typically 1-3% — stacks on top of anything Alipay charges. A no-foreign-transaction-fee card is worth more here than any splitting tactic: it saves on every single payment, including the small fee-free ones.

One quiet exception worth knowing: overseas-issued UnionPay cards are exempt from the platform’s 3% foreign-card fee. If you happen to hold one — common for travelers from parts of Asia — it’s the cheapest card to run through Chinese wallets.

Spending limits: generous once you’re verified

Limits scale with verification, and since a March 2024 policy raise by the central bank and Ant Group they’re high enough that ordinary tourists never touch them:

• Unverified (no passport uploaded): up to USD 2,000 cumulative per year under the ‘pay first, verify later’ allowance — enough to test the app, not enough for a trip. A single payment above roughly USD 500 forces identity verification on the spot.
• Passport-verified: USD 5,000 per single transaction and USD 50,000 cumulative per year. Before March 2024 these were $1,000 and $10,000 — many guides still quote the old numbers.
• You’ll also see RMB-denominated caps circulating in blogs; the official figures are the USD ones above, so treat yuan versions as approximations.

What a foreign card still cannot do

Direct binding made foreign cards first-class citizens for shopping, but a regulatory wall remains around anything that moves money between people. A foreign-card wallet pays merchants — it cannot fund person-to-person transfers. In practice that means no sending money to friends, no red packets (hongbao), no topping up your Alipay balance from the card, no Huabei credit, and no payments to a personal receive-code (收款码) — the laminated QR an individual tapes up, which the system treats as a P2P transfer. Some mini-programs and utility payments also refuse foreign cards.

The personal-QR wall is the one that strands people: a street-food stall or market vendor running on a personal code will fail for you even though the locals ahead of you paid it fine. You can spot the difference when you scan — a personal code shows a person’s name and avatar, a business code shows a shop name and logo. Ask for the merchant code or the cashier’s scan-gun (扫码枪) instead; many stalls have both. When they don’t, that’s what your small-note cash reserve is for.

None of this is fixable from your side — it’s how the regulations draw the line. Our China payment troubleshooting guide covers the workarounds, including the balance-loading trick that unlocks personal codes.

Plan B: the prepaid route now belongs to UnionPay

If your bank blocks every binding attempt and nothing in the troubleshooting playbook lands, the prepaid fallback still exists — it just moved out of Alipay. New prepaid applicants are pointed to China UnionPay, whose Nihao China app launched in December 2025 as an all-in-one inbound-visitor app covering payments, transport, and travel services.

Nihao China registers with an email or Apple account — no Chinese phone number — and binds foreign UnionPay, Visa, and Mastercard cards for QR payments with no platform fee of its own. Its prepaid ‘Tour Wallet’, run by Bank of Shanghai (the same issuer behind the old TourCard), tops up from overseas UnionPay (~0.5% load fee) or Visa, Mastercard, JCB, and Diners with fees that run up to about 5% depending on network. That top-up fee is why prepaid is Plan B, not Plan A: direct binding on Alipay is cheaper for anyone whose card cooperates.

Day one: what to do the moment you land

Start small. Buy a bottle of water or a coffee at a convenience store and pay by scanning the merchant’s QR (or letting the cashier scan yours). That first sub-¥10 transaction confirms the whole chain — card, PIN, bank approval — before you’re standing at a restaurant with a ¥300 bill and an audience.

Then let the app earn its keep: the international version bundles a translation tool and a services portal for visitors, and ride-hailing runs through the DiDi mini-program inside Alipay — our DiDi for foreigners guide covers hailing your first car. If a payment fails mid-trip, don’t reflexively delete and re-add the card; the cause is usually a personal QR, a bank block, or a limit, all diagnosed in the troubleshooting guide.

One more app worth 10 minutes: WeChat Pay. Its foreign-card flow uses the same networks and the same fee structure, and a handful of merchants take one wallet but not the other. Alipay first, WeChat Pay as backup — the pairing covers essentially everything. See our WeChat Pay for foreigners guide, and the pre-trip checklist for the full before-you-fly stack.