Differences in tactile sensory processing and social interaction have been reported in the autistic population. Here, we investigated two aspects of interpersonal touch: the pleasantness of being touched and the interpretation of social touch. We used a set of six naturalistic touch expressions, communicating happiness, sadness, attention, calming, love, and gratitude. We recruited participants from the local community or online and divided them into self-reported autistic and neurotypical groups. They completed a touch communication task, and a pleasantness rating task, either in-person or online. The autistic group’s agreement between the intended message and their response was significantly lower than that of the control group, especially driven by the intended messages of happiness and love. The average response in the autistic group was significantly lower in pleasantness ratings compared to the neurotypical group, but no differences were found for attention. For the online experiment, responses did not significantly differ between groups, neither for any of the touch expressions. Regarding ratings, lower pleasantness was found in the autistic group for calming, attention, and happiness. Our results indicate that autistic participants can identify communicated emotions better than chance. However, when touch is felt rather than observed, agreement about the meaning of touch expressions is lower as well as less pleasant. This suggests a difference in touch-specific sensory processing of emotional expression in autistic people, in line with altered CT-related touch processing in autism.