BLIK changes in September 2026: gambling block and contactless payments on iPhone

What changes on 1 September 2026: the gambling block

BLIK is the account-to-account payment system built into the apps of Polish banks. You approve a payment in your banking app and the money moves straight from your account, in shops, online and in person-to-person transfers. At the end of March 2026 it had more than 21 million active users, so if you hold a personal account in Poland, you almost certainly have BLIK in your app already.

From 1 September 2026 the system gains a new safeguard. Any BLIK payment directed to a domain listed in the Ministry of Finance register of illegal gambling websites will be blocked automatically. The transaction is rejected at the authorization stage, which means the money never leaves your account. There is no partial charge, no refund process, no chargeback to chase: the payment simply does not go through.

The scale is significant. The register held over 55,000 entries as of July 2026 and grows by roughly 700 new domains every month. BLIK checks payments against it through a direct API connection, and the block applies to transactions processed by both Polish and foreign acquirers, so routing a payment through an operator outside Poland does not bypass it.

Not a new law: who approved the block and why

A common misunderstanding is that a new gambling statute enters into force on 1 September. It does not. The block is a mechanism introduced by Polski Standard Platnosci (PSP), the operator of BLIK, and approved by the president of Narodowy Bank Polski, Poland's central bank, in a decision announced on 22 July 2026. It implements the goals of the existing gambling register rather than creating new obligations for consumers.

The policy background is a long campaign against unlicensed operators. The grey market share of online gambling in Poland fell from 58.6 percent in 2017 to 29.1 percent in 2024, and the BLIK block is meant to squeeze it further by cutting off a major payment channel for illegal operators and reducing money-laundering risk.

For an ordinary user, including a foreigner who has never opened a gambling site, nothing changes. Payments in physical shops, e-commerce checkouts and phone transfers (przelew na telefon) work exactly as before. The only scenario in which you will see a rejected transaction is an attempted payment to a domain on the register.

Contactless BLIK reaches the iPhone

The second change is more interesting for the many expats who carry an iPhone. On 30 July 2026, in a Lidl store, a customer of PKO Bank Polski made the first contactless BLIK payment on an iPhone in Poland: 5.49 zl for a pack of Junior breadsticks, paid through the PKO Junior app. Until now, contactless BLIK worked only on Android, because Apple kept the iPhone's NFC module closed to outside payment providers.

That changed because of the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA), which forced Apple to open NFC access to third-party payment services. PKO BP points out that the change matters especially for young iPhone users, some of whom cannot pay contactless at all because of age restrictions on other payment methods. The pilot deliberately starts with PKO Junior, the bank's app for children up to 13 years old.

Manage your expectations on timing. The operator and PKO BP say the service should eventually reach all iPhone users, but the pilot will take at least several months and there is no announced date. It is also not yet known which other banks will follow PKO BP or in what order, and the required iOS version has not been confirmed. PKO BP is a natural first mover: the bank says its customers already make over half of all contactless BLIK payments on Android.

BLIK in numbers: what the scale means for your Polish account

The context for both changes is that BLIK has become the default way to pay in Poland. In the first quarter of 2026 users made 756 million transactions, up 14 percent year on year, worth 117.3 billion zl, up 19 percent. For the whole of 2025 the system handled 2.9 billion transactions worth 441.5 billion zl, and the active user base grew by 2.2 million to 20.7 million people.

Two details are worth noting if you travel or shop online a lot. Contactless BLIK already works in 176 countries, with 80.5 million such transactions in Q1 2026, and the average contactless payment in 2025 was 47 zl, so this is genuinely an everyday tool rather than a niche feature. E-commerce accounted for 50.1 percent of all BLIK transactions in Q1 2026, which is why nearly every Polish online checkout shows a BLIK button.

One practical caveat for foreigners: BLIK runs on Polish zloty accounts, so it does not replace a currency account for EUR or USD when you send money home. And since the gambling block itself costs you nothing, the fees that actually deserve your attention are the standard account charges: our guide to hidden bank fees in Poland shows where banks quietly add costs.