How long does an NFC chip last?

This is the question shop owners ask right before buying, and the one product pages answer worst. This guide extends our comparison of NFC and QR codes, which explains how both technologies work.

The chip does not wear out, and that is not a sales pitch

An NFC chip is a passive component. It contains no battery, no capacitor, not the slightest reserve of energy. Until a phone comes near, it draws nothing and does nothing. There is therefore no mechanism of electrical wear: nothing discharges, nothing heats up, nothing degrades as time passes.

Two operations then have to be told apart, and they are routinely confused. Reading a chip means consulting its memory — the equivalent of re-reading a page. Writing to it means changing its contents, and that is the operation with a limit. Manufacturers quote around 100,000 write cycles, a figure often presented, wrongly, as a maximum number of reads.

On our plates that limit simply does not apply. Our chips are locked against writing at manufacture: their contents are frozen and nobody can change them any more — ourselves included. The write counter therefore stops at its factory value and never moves again, however many customers tap it.

That leaves data retention, meaning the memory's ability to hold what it stores with no power. Manufacturers guarantee around ten years. That is a contractual floor, not a deadline: a chip does not wipe itself on its tenth birthday, and components of this kind routinely exceed that figure.

What actually fails: the casing, not the component

The chip itself measures less than a square millimetre. It is not what breaks. Around it runs a copper antenna, a spiral a few micrometres thick, and that wire is the real weak point.

• Bending. Bending a chip, even slightly but often, eventually snaps the antenna. That is the fate of cards kept in a wallet and sat on all day. A rigid product never has this problem.
• Moisture. An exposed copper antenna oxidises. Corrosion does not require immersion: a cloth wiped daily across a porous surface is enough to let water in at the edges.
• UV light. It never reaches the chip but weakens what holds it: thin plastic left in a shop window yellows, hardens, then cracks. The antenna follows.
• Impacts. A product dropped onto a tiled floor takes it badly. A solid plate spreads the energy; a flexible film concentrates it exactly where the antenna runs.

Thin film or epoxy resin: what the casing changes

Here are the orders of magnitude we observe on a shop counter — daily cleaning, handling, exposure to light. These are usage estimates, not laboratory measurements, and they describe the product, never the chip.

The difference is not down to the quality of the chip, which is comparable from one supplier to the next. It is down to what surrounds it. That also explains the price: casting epoxy resin costs more than printing a sticker, and shows in use far more than it does on unboxing.

How many reads, in practice

Take a busy shop: twenty customers tapping every day, without exception. That comes to roughly 7,300 reads a year, or 73,000 over ten years. At no point does that total bring the chip near a limit, for the reason set out above: those 73,000 operations are reads, and the write counter stays at zero.

Put another way, "how many taps will my plate take?" has no useful numerical answer, because the tap is not what limits anything. The real question is about the product: how many years of cleaning, knocks and sunlight can it absorb.

What happens at end of life

There is no gradual decline. An NFC chip does not grow "tired": it responds, and then one day it does not, usually because the antenna has broken. The failure is clean-cut, and that is good news — you do not lose reviews for months without knowing.

This has a useful practical consequence. If your plate responds more slowly than it used to, it is never the chip. Look elsewhere: a metal surface recently fitted beneath the plate, a thick phone case, or simply the network, which loads the page once the tap has succeeded. Our guide on metal and NFC covers the first case, by far the most common.

And when a product does finally give out, the destination is not lost: it is tied to your account, not to the piece of resin. A replacement Google review plate takes over with nothing for you to set up again.

How to check that an NFC chip still works

Two minutes are enough to know whether a plate is still good, and above all to tell a dead chip from an environmental problem.

1. Test the plate in mid-air. Hold it away from any surface and bring up a phone with NFC switched on. If it responds, the chip and its antenna are intact.
2. Try again on its usual surface. Put it back where it is installed and test again. A read that only works in mid-air points to the surface, not the chip.
3. Try a second phone. NFC turned off in the settings, or a thick case, explain most reported faults. Another handset settles it in ten seconds.
4. Scan the QR code. If it opens the right page while the tap gives nothing, the antenna is broken: the plate needs replacing, but the destination is still valid.