The Australian government has announced it will mandate that businesses selling essential goods and services must accept cash from 2026, and has confirmed that cheques will no longer be accepted as legal tender from 2029.
So how many Australians are still paying with cash?
The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) conducts a survey every three years in which 1,000 Australians record all their transactions over a week. From this data the RBA estimates the percentage of transactions (not the dollar value) by each payment type.
The decline in cash payments has been rapid – in 2007 it accounted for 69% of transactions, but in 2022 only 13%.
Conversely, credit and debit cards together now account for 77% of transactions.
The RBA surveys show lower income, older and regional Australians are more likely to use cash. But it’s also in these groups that cash use has declined the most in recent years.
Cash use has declined the most among over-65s since 2019 – from 52% of transactions to 27% in 2022 – but the trend is similar across all age groups:
Debit card use overtook cash some time between 2016 and 2019, and now accounts for more than half of payments. Credit card payments also displaced cash during the Covid pandemic.
Half of those surveyed in 2022 – the latest data available – did not use cash at all in the week, up from just over a third in the 2019 survey.
Just 5% used cash for all in-person transactions in the 2022 survey, compared with 10% in 2019.
Privacy and security were the biggest reasons to use cash, according to survey respondents who said it would be difficult if shops stopped accepting it. Other reasons included disability, not having another way to pay and poor internet access.
There was a large increase in the share of people citing privacy and security between the 2019 and 2022 surveys, and a large drop in those saying there was no other way to pay.
Australians most commonly use cash for leisure activities such as eating out and gambling, and for services such as hairdressers and babysitters. Transport has undergone the biggest decline in cash use in recent years, due in part to the rise of ride-sharing and public transport payment cards.