Reminder to all commenters that Europe is not a single homogeneous country and somewhat diverse in various things, including payments and finance. Credit cards are definitely a thing in many European countries.
A credit card, if misused, can run up your balance and then you dispute, and don't pay anything until it's resolved. A debit card, if misused, can drain your account and leave you penniless until it's resolved.
Separately the EU is a large collection of states and each one has its varying levels of participation and sophistication with payment processing. Apple and Google Pay are both widely used and that won’t change, and by and large there’s no good reason for Europeans to not accept American credit cards so they’ll continue to do so.
Anyone telling you differently either doesn’t have the slightest idea what they’re talking about or they’re just caught up in a pointless anti-American fervor. Even in countries such as France American Express is accepted in more places.
Almost nobody considered this a problem until a few years ago, but the relevant EU stakeholders got pretty rattled recently [1], and my prediction is that this particular bell can't be un-rung.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/law/2026/feb/18/international-cr...
Each nation or economic block or alliance or whatever will have to decide which kinds of products and services they’ll want to protect or build in-house. While the EU lambasted the United States when it began taking measures to do what the EU is doing now, it’s encouraging to see the EU change course and start to protect its industries, though who knows how effective that will be. China is looming large over the EU, Germany in particular.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possession_is_nine-tenths_of_t...
What matters are the legal and contractual rights and obligations you have against the card issuer. In the US, these are historically different for credit cards (Fed Regulation Z) and debit cards (Regulation E), but since it's now effectively the same two schemes running it all and imposing their additional liability protections (largely motivated by considerations of brand perception, which would suffer if the same logo sometimes confers weaker protections).
The main practical difference nowadays is that in the case of debit cards, you're out your own money for a few days, while with credit cards, the only thing that temporarily suffers is your open-to-buy/line of credit.
Right, and this is GGP's main point
The risk to a debit card user in the US is higher because the money you need to pay your rent or mortgage may temporarily disappear due to fraud, and may take longer to resolve than your deadline with your landlord. When using a credit card, that risk is not on you.
I think the risk is higher in the US compared to Europe because Europe was way faster to roll out chip stuff, whereas in the US it's still somewhat common to have to use the mag stripe.
Everyone in America is perfectly aware that the "dispute" button exists.
Trouble is, the lag time between hitting the button and getting your money back can be weeks. With a credit card you are out zero money.
Nope, it's as soon as the bank is aware. In your rush to correct me, you failed to understand that there are simply better customers protection here which make a product such as a credit card mostly useless.
I'm almost tempted to test it right now but I am pretty sure I did this once and it took under 1 day
Ok now I asked a chatbot for how this is regulated. The answer was wrong as expected but it happened to mention the applicable regulation which can be looked up at gesezte-im-internet.de
§ 675u BGB - requires immediate credit for unauthorized card payments
§ 675x BGB - chargeback in 10 days for direct debit transactions (lastschrift)
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/bgb/__675x.html
I guess this is just germany but I vagely remember a payment processor eu directive that this is probably implementing (PSD)
-> Yes. It is article 73 and 76 of PSD
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
So this holds EU wide for all banks.
This was literally 15 mins of googling (well duckduck ing) on the train.
Now there still could be counterveiling evidence and ianal etc, so use grain of salt. Gotta get off now.
Sounds like the US and Euro systems work fine within their own borders. Solutions designed for one make less sense in the context of the other.
If you tried to make a purchase above the spending limit it was a hassle. I am old tho.
By the way, here banks even have daily bank / wire transfer limit that can be changed only by a personal visit to a branch, so even if your online banking credentials are stolen, the attacker can not empty your account.
And that doesn’t always work. For example, at a Chevron petrol station in California in the middle of nowhere we tried several European credit and debit cards, and nothing worked. At the end, the guy working there helped us with some prepaid option at the counter. He didn’t believe us until he tried himself that really none of our cards worked.
But the situation is way better than 5+ years ago. Back then, almost every second purchase of ours had some problem with our cards in the US. Now, we had like one or two in more than a week.
But of course, some car rental companies still pretend that they are generous that they allow debit cards. Not just in the US.
The "credit" button in the US really means "use the Visa/Mastercard network and don't ask me for a PIN", as opposed to "feel free to ask me for my PIN and route the transaction over one of a dozen or so US domestic debit networks". The question doesn't even make sense for non-US debit cards.
In the US it's common for much of one's money to be in a checking account, the same one to which your debit card is effective.
It's much better to be indebted when buying something simply because if something goes wrong its much easier to convince someone to take their thing back when you haven't paid yet than trying to convince someone to send your money back and accept a return.
Your second paragraph is accurate.
Ireland and the U.K. seem much more credit-card oriented than rest of Europe. Turkey is also very CC oriented (kinda strange - was not expecting that).
https://www.ukfinance.org.uk/data-and-research/data/card-spe...
But it definitely changed massively during Covid. Before Covid shops refusing _any_ card where still common (again, large cities is my spectrum) and debit card were accepted vastly more often than credit card.
Suppose in January two people Carol and Dave bought a £250 August flight to Paris from some outfit that didn't do a great job hedging their fuel prices. Carol used her credit card, Dave used his Debit card. UK law says Carol's flight was bought by her bank, after all her bank handed over the money, Carol is on the hook to pay them back but didn't directly pay. But Dave bought his ticket, the bank isn't responsible.
Today the airline fails because their fuel costs blew up. UK law says Carol should be able to get her money back from the bank because they bought this ticket and now it won't work -- this is called "Section 75". Dave may have some protections via other consumer protection rules, but he's more likely to end up losing out.
The best chance for Dave might be "Chargeback" which is a card scheme which might let Dave tell his bank that he now wishes he didn't pay for the ticket. It's not very likely to work because January is a long time ago and so the bank will probably argue that Dave should have realised earlier that he didn't want to make this transaction. Because this flight touches the EU there are a bunch of extra protections which might help, none of them is as simple as Section 75.
The Section 75 protections mean Brits who are credit-worthy tend to pay for large purchases on a [credit] card even if they intend to pay it off immediately.
The banks took on a little bit of risk and in return unlocked a free money generator.
On the contrary debit cards are revenue-neutral or even loss-making for them
So, no, you do not have the same legal protection as Section 75, but it is always worth a try.
And Visa and Mastercard's global zero liability provisions protect everybody with a debit card, so de facto the difference is no longer relevant.
That said, some banks are pretty bad at making use of their dispute rights with the networks. I've seen several German issuers actually refuse to file "service not provided" disputes in case of a large airline bankruptcy a few years ago. (German bankruptcy managers can be somewhat intimidating rhetorically, but fortunately their personal opinions have no bearing on banking/payment laws.)
Italians don't really care about credit cards, they just want to pay with their "Bancomat" card.
Mostly people use UPI, which is equivalent to debit cards given that amounts go directly from one bank to another. But UPI also supports some credit cards and lines, so there's that.
Yes, a thing associated with debt.
I lived in the UK before Brexit, and that would be an example of such.
The UK has pay by bank, which is very like digital cash, and can be used online, but its much less used than cards are.