Tangem Pay cashback skips in-store spending in the EU and UK
Tangem Pay now pays cashback on card spending: 1% on the free Basic plan, 2% on the paid Plus plan, credited in USDC to the Tangem Pay account at the end of each billing cycle. There are no points and no redemption step — the cashback arrives as balance and can be spent with the same card.
Two conditions do most of the work in deciding what a given month actually earns, and neither of them is a rate.
Purchases under $30 earn nothing
Cashback requires a minimum transaction amount of $30. A purchase below that does not qualify at all, at either tier.
This removes a specific and very common slice of spending: coffee, transit, lunch, a single grocery run for one person. A month built out of small daily payments can pass through a card without generating any cashback, while a single $600 purchase generates $12 on Plus. The rate is uniform; what varies is which transactions the rate is allowed to touch.
In-store payments at EU and UK merchants are excluded
Tangem attributes this to interchange fee regulation in the EU and UK, and the exclusion is drawn around the terminal rather than the cardholder. In-store purchases at EU and UK merchants earn no cashback, and that includes tap-to-pay through Apple Pay, Google Pay and the physical card at those terminals.
What still earns, for an EU or UK cardholder:
- Online purchases at EU merchants.
- Every purchase made outside the EU, in-store and online alike.
For a US cardholder the rule inverts into something much simpler: cashback applies everywhere except in-store transactions at EU merchants.
Put next to each other, the same card is a general-purpose rewards card in the United States and a travel-and-online rewards card in Europe. A cardholder in Berlin who buys groceries, coffee and train tickets in person, then books a flight online, earns on the flight and nothing else. Certain merchant categories are excluded on top of this, with the full list of codes in the cashback terms.
The caps bind at $10,000 and $15,000 of eligible spend
Basic pays 1% up to $100 of cashback a month, which is $10,000 of eligible spending. Plus pays 2% up to $300 a month, which is $15,000. Above those points the rate is effectively zero, and the difference between the plans stops widening.
Plus costs $29.99 a month and is free in months with $4,500 of spending. Below that threshold the plan has to earn its fee out of the extra one percentage point, which needs about $3,000 of eligible spend in the month. Above roughly $3,000 of eligible spend, Plus is ahead even while paying; below it, Basic keeps more.
The threshold and the exclusions are stated separately, and Tangem does not say whether spending that is ineligible for cashback still counts toward the $4,500 that waives the fee. For a European cardholder whose in-store spending is excluded, the gap between those two numbers is the whole question: $4,500 of everyday in-person payments could waive the fee while earning nothing at all.
Plus adds Visa Signature cards and halves the ATM fee
Plus issues Visa Signature cards, up to five per user, against up to three Visa Platinum cards on Basic. Daily spending limits per card run $10,000 on Basic and $50,000 on Plus. Plus also carries Visa Signature benefits, free ACH top-ups from a US bank, and a lower ATM fee — 2% against 4% on Basic, within a $250 per-withdrawal limit and three withdrawals per 24 hours, as covered earlier.
Funding the account is unchanged in shape but wider in assets: USDC and USDT on Polygon, Base, Arbitrum and BNB Smart Chain, either swapped across from a Tangem Wallet balance or sent in from another wallet or exchange. Sending an unsupported token, or a supported token on the wrong network, is unrecoverable.
The number to work out first is eligible spend, not total spend
Anyone comparing the two plans is really comparing two filtered versions of their own statement. Strip out purchases under $30, then strip out in-person payments at EU and UK merchants if that applies, and what remains is the base the rate multiplies. That figure decides both whether Plus pays for itself and whether either plan is worth routing spending through at all.
Sources: Cashback Is Here: Your Tangem Pay Spending Now Earns You Back, Tangem Pay tiers, Funding, Withdrawals & Fees.
