Originally Posted by
nexusCFX
I've done $4800 on my USBank Altitude Reserve via Apple Pay in person as a portion of car payment. There's no set limit but your bank could theoretically set their own. In the USA I can't imagine why they would though. Countries that have NFC limits on tapping the card itself generally have them because they have chip+pin and so if someone gets a hold of your card they can't make any large purchases. In the USA, Apple Pay is clearly more secure than using the card directly.
It depends on the type of PIN, really. With the ones where the PIN isn't stored on the locally issued cards (Australia for example), you can tap physical cards for unlimited amounts but you'll be made to enter the PIN for larger purchases. In those places, tapping US issued physical cards will also trigger signature prompting for larger amounts as PIN on contactless is even more rare than PIN when inserting (and the latter was already pretty rare, debit notwithstanding). If the PIN is stored on the locally issued cards, though, you'll be forced to insert for larger purchases regardless of where your card was issued.
Regardless, domestic behavior is probably not a good representation of how US issued cards will behave elsewhere as banks (and some merchants) have historically loathed requiring
any form of authentication that's remotely worthwhile. In fact, these days a lot of places have specifically disabled PIN support on terminals to force signature/no authentication so they didn't have to deal with the few customers with chip and PIN cards.