NFC Enabled Phones List

Does your phone have NFC ?

A few years ago there were no more than a handful of phones supporting NFC. Now, all of the top ten manufacturers sell NFC phones. Over time, this phone list has grown and it’s regularly updated to keep the list as accurate as possible. Please use this as a guideline only because there are regional variations.

Popular Searches

The current most popular searches are Apple iPhone X, Apple iPhone 8, Samsung Galaxy S9, Samsung Galaxy S8 and Pixel 2.

Find your phone in the full NFC enabled phone list.

Does the iPhone have NFC ?

Sort of. The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus have NFC, but only for payments. The iPhones 7, 8 and X also have NFC for payments but additionally, with iOS 11 and an NFC App, they can read NFC tags. At present, no iPhone can write to an NFC tag.

However, with the release of iOS 11, is is now possible to natively scan a qr code with the iPhone. It is likely that in the future the iPhone may also be able to natively scan NFC tags but there is no guarantee or release date for this.

The iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus were the first Apple iPhone mobile phones with NFC technology built in. However, while you can use NFC in the iPhone 6/6S to make payments, you can’t and won’t be able to use it to read NFC Tags.

However, the iPhone 7 and new iPhone 8 and iPhone X also have NFC and can, if they are running at least iOS 11, read NFC tags.

There’s some important notes here. Firstly, the iPhone 7/8/X can only read NFC tags. They cannot yet write. Whether they will be able to write in the future is not known. Secondly, and very importantly, unlike Android, at the time of writing there was no native support within iOS for reading NFC tags. This means that users will need to download an App to scan an NFC tag.

Which NFC tags are compatible with my phone ?

Many of NFC tags available on the market are compatible with all mobile phones. The exception is the ‘MIFARE® Classic 1k’ chip which does not work with all mobiles. The MIFARE Classic 1k is not listed for compatibility any more here because it is really now more of a specialist chip.

There is another more common problem that is listed here which is that Windows phones require that NFC tags with an MFIARE Ultralight® chip are formatted (‘NDEF formatted’) before they can be encoded by the phone. On the table below, this is indicated this with ‘format‘.

Legacy Mobile Phones