Overview
- The Federal Reserve’s initial 2025 triennial payments study reports 236.6 billion noncash transactions in 2024, more than triple the total since 2000.
- Cards made over three quarters of noncash payments by count in 2024, while debit cards remained the largest share of card use and credit card transactions grew faster than debit.
- The ACH network accounted for almost three quarters of noncash payments by value, handling large transfers such as payroll and bill payments that drive total dollar volume.
- Check payments and ATM cash withdrawals continued their long-term decline in both number and value, even as the average value per check and per ATM withdrawal rose.
- Despite stablecoins exceeding $300 billion in market value and the GENIUS Act creating a payment-stablecoin framework in July 2025, the Fed’s dataset shows stablecoin and other crypto retail payments at effectively zero, a gap that matters for investors and startups building alternatives to card and ACH rails and that the Fed says it will examine in more detail in upcoming analysis.