In 2022 the number of cash payments in the UK rose for the first time in a decade, as households turned to notes and coins to budget through the cost-of-living squeeze. The rebound proved a one-year exception: by 2024 cash had fallen to 4.4 billion payments, under a tenth of the UK total.
The long retreat of cash has been steady enough that its end is routinely forecast: cash settled about 48% of UK payments in 2014 and single digits — 9% — by 2024.2 The year 2022 broke the pattern. The number of cash payments rose to 6.4 billion, up about 7% on 2021 and the first annual increase in roughly a decade, according to UK Finance.2
UK Finance attributes the 2022 rise to households using notes and coins to manage tight budgets as inflation peaked.2 The behaviour showed up elsewhere: the Post Office logged record over-the-counter cash withdrawals through 2022, which it linked to week-by-week budgeting.3 The Bank of England, tracking the same period, described a partial post-pandemic recovery in cash use followed by a stabilisation, set against a longer decade-long fall in transactional cash.1
The reprieve was brief. Cash payments fell back to about 6.0 billion in 2023 and then to 4.4 billion in 2024, a drop of 27%.2 For the first time cash accounted for under a tenth of all UK payments, and it ceased to be the second most-used method — overtaken by Direct Debit, Faster Payments and credit cards.2 UK Finance projects cash to fall to about 4% of payments by 2034; that figure is a forecast, not a measurement.2
Transaction counts are not the whole of cash’s role. Over the past decade transactional cash use fell while the value of Bank of England notes in circulation rose — the “cash paradox” — as notes are increasingly held as a store of value or held overseas rather than spent.1 A 9% share of payments does not mean cash is 9% of the economy. UK Finance’s figures are modelled estimates built from member data, clearing schemes and an annual survey rather than a transaction census, so single-year moves carry some uncertainty; the +7% for 2022 is UK Finance’s own published figure.2 And the cause of the 2022 rise — budgeting under inflation — is an attributed behavioural reading, not a measured mechanism.