skip to main navigation skip to secondary navigation skip to content
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
skip to content

The Federal Reserve Payments Study 2016

Key Findings

  • U.S. noncash payments, including debit card, credit card, ACH, and check payments, are estimated to have totaled over 144 billion with a value of almost $178 trillion in 2015, up almost 21 billion payments or about $17 trillion since 2012. (See table 2 at the end of the brief for a presentation of most of the data discussed in this report.) Total noncash payments increased at an annual rate of 5.3 percent by number or 3.4 percent by value from 2012 to 2015.
  • The number of debit card payments (including payments with prepaid and non-prepaid cards) grew to 69.5 billion in 2015 with a value of $2.56 trillion, up 13.0 billion or $0.46 trillion since 2012. This was the largest increase in number of payments among the payment types considered. Debit card payments grew at an annual rate of 7.1 percent by number or 6.8 percent by value from 2012 to 2015 with most of the growth occurring in non-prepaid debit card payments.
  • The number of credit card payments reached 33.8 billion in 2015 with a value of $3.16 trillion, up 6.9 billion or $0.61 trillion since 2012. Credit card payments grew at an annual rate of 8.0 percent by number or 7.4 percent by value from 2012 to 2015, the largest growth rates among the payment types considered.
  • The number of total ACH payments is estimated to have grown to 23.5 billion in 2015 with a value of $145.30 trillion, up 3.1 billion by number or $16.29 trillion since 2012. Total ACH payments are estimated to have grown at an annual rate of 4.9 percent by number or 4.0 percent by value from 2012 to 2015.
  • The number of check payments fell to 17.3 billion with a value of $26.83 trillion, down 2.5 billion or $0.38 trillion since 2012.5 Check payments fell at an annual rate of 4.4 percent by number or 0.5 percent by value from 2012 to 2015. The decline of checks over the period was slower than declines in previously documented periods since 2003.
  • Payments with general-purpose cards using embedded microchips, which improve the security of in-person payments to help prevent fraud, have grown by 230 percent per year since 2012. But payments with the chip-based cards amounted to only about 2 percent share of total in-person general-purpose card payments in 2015, reflecting the early stages of a broad industry effort to roll out chip card technology.
  • In 2015, the proportion of total general-purpose card fraud by value attributed to counterfeiting, the most prevalent type of in-person card fraud in the United States, was substantially greater than in countries where chip technology has been more widely adopted.


References

5. Estimates for the number and value of check payments in calendar year 2012, which were based on data collected in March 2013, have been adjusted for comparability with survey data collected for calendar year 2015 in the present study. Similar adjustments to make annualized estimates line up more closely with the calendar year have been made for earlier study data. The methodological adjustments, which accounted for measured declines between studies, increased the total number and value of check payments estimated for previous years but had an insignificant effect on previously estimated trends. Return to text

Last update: July 18, 2017

Back to Top