Klarna referral code — £40 referrer bonus + £10 new joiner

About Klarna

Klarna is the Swedish payments network that defined Buy Now, Pay Later for a generation of UK shoppers. The company was founded in Stockholm on 1 July 2005 by three Stockholm School of Economics students — Sebastian Siemiatkowski, Niklas Adalberth and Victor Jacobsson — under the original name Kreditor Europe AB. It rebranded to Klarna in 2009, holds a full banking licence from Finansinspektionen, the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority, and on 10 September 2025 listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker KLAR. The IPO priced at $40 a share, closed its first day up 15% at $45.82, and valued the business at roughly $19.65 billion — the largest US listing of 2025 at the time it went out.

In the UK, Klarna is best known as the company behind Pay in 3 (split a purchase into three interest-free monthly payments) and Pay in 30 days (receive your goods, try them, pay in full within a month). By May 2025 Klarna had 11 million active UK customers, with 60,000-plus merchant partners — including Argos, eBay, Eurostar and John Lewis — making the UK Klarna's third-largest market globally. Globally, Klarna closed 2025 with 118 million active consumers across 966,000 merchants and $3.5 billion of revenue, up 25% year on year.

The product story in the UK changed materially during 2025. On 30 July 2025 the FCA granted Klarna Financial Services UK Limited (company number 14290857) authorisation as an Electronic Money Institution, firm reference number 1021834. That EMI permission unlocked two new products which together turn Klarna from a checkout add-on into something closer to a digital bank: Klarna balance, an e-money wallet that holds and moves customer funds, and the Klarna Card, a Visa debit-first card issued instantly into Apple Wallet or Google Wallet and powered by Visa Flexible Credential — the same single-credential technology Visa uses to let a card flip between debit, BNPL and credit on demand. Both products went live in the UK from 16 October 2025, with a four-tier paid Memberships scheme — Core, Plus, Premium, Max — following on 27 October 2025.

The Klarna Card invite is the offer this page covers.

How the £40 / £10 invite works

The mechanic is two-sided and asymmetric. The friend who accepts the invite earns £10; the existing Klarna Card holder who issued the invite earns £40 per completed referral, capped at ten paid invites for a maximum of £400. (The in-app screen reads "Get rewarded for up to 10 invites" without publishing a reset window, so treat the £400 as the total published cap.) The activity that triggers payment is the same on both sides: the friend signs up for the Klarna Card and completes three Card purchases of £5 or more, each at a separate merchant transaction, within 30 days of accepting the invite. As soon as the third qualifying purchase clears, both rewards land in their respective Klarna balance wallets.

Heads-up for referrers: Klarna's invite landing page displays your Klarna profile name to anyone who opens the link. If you plan to share your own Klarna invite link publicly, change your Klarna app display name (Settings → Personal details) to a neutral handle before doing so — Klarna keeps your legal/KYC name unchanged on the account for AML compliance, but the public-facing display name on the invite landing page is editable.

The full sequence:

1. The existing Klarna Card holder opens the Klarna app, scrolls to the Card section and taps Invite friends. The app generates a personal link that the referrer shares.
2. The new user taps the link on a phone with the Klarna app (or installs the app on first tap), opens it and accepts the invite. This is the moment the 30-day window starts.
3. The new user applies for the Klarna Card from inside the app. The virtual Klarna Card lands in Apple Wallet or Google Wallet within minutes. There is no credit check at sign-up for the debit-mode card; a credit check is only carried out if the user later applies for a Pay in 3 or instalment plan inside the Card.
4. Over the following 30 days, the new user makes three separate purchases of £5 or more with the Klarna Card. Any Visa-accepting merchant counts, online or in store, UK or abroad.
5. After the third qualifying transaction settles, Klarna credits £10 to the new user's Klarna balance and £40 to the referrer's Klarna balance.

Klarna balance funds can be spent inside Klarna (at any Klarna checkout), spent on the Klarna Card (the wallet is the Card's default funding source), used to settle outstanding Klarna BNPL plans, or withdrawn to a linked debit card. The £10 and the £40 are fungible Klarna balance credit, not vouchers tied to a particular retailer.

What's a Klarna membership and the Klarna Card

The in-app screen says "Sign up for the Klarna Card — Available with a Klarna membership." It is worth unpacking that wording, because Klarna uses "membership" to describe two different things.

The free, baseline Klarna membership is the account you create when you sign up for the Klarna Card. It costs nothing, includes a Klarna balance wallet and a virtual Klarna Card, and is all you need to qualify for the £10 referral bonus. This is the tier the screen is referring to.

The paid Klarna Memberships — Core (£1.99/mo), Plus (price not publicly disclosed at launch), Premium (£17.99/mo) and Max (£44.99/mo) — launched on 27 October 2025. They unlock a physical Klarna Card (in aubergine, black or bright green), tiered cashback on Klarna balance spending, subscription bundles (Headspace, MasterClass, ClassPass, Audiobooks.com, The Times & Sunday Times, Vogue, GQ), travel insurance and, at the Max tier, unlimited LoungeKey airport lounge access. None of these tiers is required for the £40 / £10 referral. Anyone who tells you otherwise has misread the offer.

The Klarna Card itself is a Visa debit-first card. Purchases default to debit, drawn from the Klarna balance wallet. After the fact, eligible purchases can be flipped into a Pay in 3 instalment plan from inside the app (this is where the Visa Flexible Credential technology earns its keep). The card has no foreign exchange fees, supports Apple Pay and Google Pay on both virtual and physical, and is accepted at over 150 million Visa merchant locations worldwide. The UK card is issued by Klarna Financial Services UK Limited under its FCA EMI licence — distinct from the US Klarna Card, which is issued by WebBank.

What counts as a qualifying shop

Three purchases, £5 minimum each, at separate merchant transactions, with the Klarna Card, within 30 days of accepting the invite. That is the contract.

Klarna excludes three categories:

• Transfers — peer-to-peer movements between Klarna users, or moves from Klarna balance to a linked debit card.
• Top-ups — adding funds into the Klarna balance wallet from a debit card. This used to count under an earlier version of the campaign; Klarna tightened the rule in early 2026 to require explicit merchant spending.
• Financial services — gambling merchant category codes, money-transfer MCCs, possibly cryptocurrency on-ramps, and any Klarna-branded financial-product purchases.

A safe pattern for a new user: a coffee at a cafe (£5+), a corner-shop spend (£5+) and an online order at any UK retailer that accepts Visa debit (£5+). Three transactions, three merchants, three days apart, well within the 30-day window. Avoid splitting a single basket across two Klarna Card transactions in the same session — Klarna's anti-abuse logic may collapse them into one qualifying event.

Eligibility traps to avoid

A few patterns that cause referrals to fail to credit:

• The referee already held a Klarna Card. "Available to friends who haven't used the Klarna Card" is read strictly. If the friend previously held the Card — even briefly during the October 2025 launch wave — they will not qualify, even if they have since cancelled it.
• The referee opened the invite link on the wrong device. Klarna's attribution requires that the link is opened and the Klarna app installation (or sign-in) happens on the same device. Forwarding the link to a friend who then types it manually into a desktop browser may break attribution.
• Top-up-only spending. A new user who funds the Klarna balance with £15 and then "spends" three times of £5 against that balance is borderline — Klarna's current rules require purchases at merchants, not internal moves. Use the Card at real merchants.
• A 30-day window that elapses on day 31. Three Card purchases within 30 calendar days from the moment of accepting the invite. The qualifying purchase has to settle (not just authorise) within the window.
• The referrer or referee closes their Klarna balance account before the reward triggers. The "balance required to redeem" disclaimer means the wallet must exist to receive the credit.

Redemption — the 'balance required' note

The Klarna in-app screen carries the disclaimer "Balance required to redeem referral rewards." This means the £40 (and the £10) is credited to a Klarna balance wallet — the e-money product Klarna launched alongside the Card in October 2025. A Klarna balance wallet is automatically opened when someone signs up for the Klarna Card, so the practical reading of the disclaimer is: keep the Klarna Card active until the reward lands.

Once the reward credits, the £40 sits inside the referrer's Klarna balance under their own name. It can then be spent inside Klarna's checkout network (at any retailer that accepts Klarna), spent through the Klarna Card at any Visa merchant, used to settle an outstanding Klarna BNPL plan, or withdrawn to a linked debit card. There is no expiry on Klarna balance credit, and there is no restriction on combining the £40 with other Klarna balance funds.

One safeguard reader should know: Klarna balance is not FSCS-protected. Klarna is an EMI in the UK, not a deposit-taking bank, so the £85,000 deposit guarantee scheme does not apply. Customer funds are held in segregated safeguarding accounts under the Electronic Money Regulations 2011, which return funds in insolvency but on a slower timetable than FSCS. For the £40 referral credit specifically, this is a non-issue — the practical advice is "do not park large sums in Klarna balance long-term" rather than "do not claim the reward."

Klarna in the UK — regulatory framing

Three points worth knowing before signing up.

First, BNPL is moving into regulation. Pay in 3 and Pay in 30 are unregulated consumer credit in the UK as of May 2026. The Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Regulated Activities etc.) Order 2025 brings BNPL — formally renamed "Deferred Payment Credit" by the FCA — into the FCA's scope. The regime starts on 15 July 2026, with a Temporary Permissions Regime opening on 15 May 2026. From day one of regulation, BNPL providers are expected to be subject to affordability checks, the FCA Consumer Duty and Financial Ombudsman access; HM Treasury's published draft Order also proposes to extend Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act to qualifying BNPL credit agreements between £100 and £30,000. The exact perimeter of Section 75 coverage will be finalised in the FCA's policy statement before commencement.

Second, Klarna already reports to credit reference agencies. Since June 2023, Klarna has shared Pay in 3 and Pay in 30 repayment behaviour with Experian, TransUnion and Equifax. Used responsibly, this can build a credit file — particularly for people whose file is thin. Used badly — missed payments, late payments — it can damage one. Klarna does not charge late fees on most BNPL products but does pass overdue balances to debt collection agencies, which leaves a mark.

Third, the Klarna Card has different protections to BNPL. The debit-mode Card is regulated as e-money under FCA EMI permission, FRN 1021834. The credit-mode Card (when a purchase is flipped into a Pay in 3 plan after the fact) carries the same regulatory caveats as BNPL until 15 July 2026.

For shoppers: borrow what you can comfortably repay, use BNPL as a budgeting tool rather than a credit-extension tool, and remember that the Klarna app is now a credit product with all the obligations and protections that implies.

Klarna vs Affirm vs Clearpay

Three names dominate BNPL in the UK and US. Brief comparison from a UK referee's perspective:

• Klarna: 11 million UK customers (May 2025), full Swedish banking licence, UK EMI authorisation, the most-merchant-accepted of the three (60,000+ UK retailers), and the only one to ship a Visa-rail debit card in the UK (October 2025). Pay in 3, Pay in 30, Pay Later financing on the Card, paid Memberships layer, Klarna balance e-money wallet.
• Clearpay (the UK brand of Block Inc.'s Afterpay): 4 weekly instalments (the classic "Pay in 4") rather than 3 monthly. Strong fashion-retail integration (ASOS, Boohoo, JD Sports) but a smaller merchant network outside of fashion. No native debit card in the UK.
• Affirm: Major US BNPL player and recent UK launch (2025) targeting longer-tenor financing (3–60 months, sometimes interest-bearing) rather than the short-tenor Pay in 3 model. Issues an Affirm Card in the US via Visa Flexible Credential; the UK equivalent is still on the roadmap.

Klarna's edge in the UK is breadth of merchant acceptance and the fact that it is now a card-shaped product, not just a checkout button. The £40 / £10 referral is, in part, Klarna acquiring Card holders ahead of Affirm's UK card landing.

Source documentation

The £40 / £10 figures, the 30-day window, the three-purchase mechanic, the £5 minimum, the exclusion list and the "balance required to redeem" disclaimer are taken from the in-app Klarna Card Invite screen captured in May 2026. Klarna Group plc investor relations is the source for the FY 2025 results (118M consumers, $3.5B revenue), Q3 2025 release (4M Card sign-ups in 4 months), and the FCA EMI authorisation announcement (30 July 2025). FCA Register entries confirm Klarna Financial Services UK Limited's permissions (FRNs 987889 and 1021834). The BNPL regulation timeline is taken from the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Regulated Activities etc.) Order 2025 and the FCA's published Deferred Payment Credit implementation schedule (15 July 2026 start). Brand guidelines are sourced from brand.klarna.com. Programme terms are set by Klarna and may change without notice — HonestCodes re-verifies every brand page monthly and the date at the top of this page reflects the last full check.