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Still using cash? You’re in good company
Cash use has stopped declining for the first time in nearly two decades, with millions of Australians still relying on notes and coins.
- Half of Australians used cash at least once a week in 2025, up from 47 per cent in 2022, according to new RBA research.
- Three in four Australians still carry cash, while one in five say they would face hardship if they could no longer use it.
- Despite the ban on card surcharges, cash could remain attractive to shoppers, with retailers still allowed to offer discounts for cash payments.
Late last year, the Reserve Bank gave 1,200 Australians diaries and asked them to record every payment they made over a week, all 14,000 transactions.
A surprising finding for anyone thinking cash is on the way out is that half of the Australians surveyed, every second person, used cash at least once that week.
Even more surprising, the proportion using cash climbed from an all-time low of 47% when the survey was last conducted in 2022 to 50%.
For the first time in the seven surveys the Bank has conducted since 2007, cash use has stopped falling.
Back in 2007, almost all of us used cash at least once a week. By 2013, it was 92 per cent; by 2016, 82 per cent; and on the eve of COVID in 2019, 66 per cent. The latest results, of 47% and now 50%, suggest the use of cash has reached a floor beneath which it no longer falls quickly.
And almost all of us use cash at least some of the time. When asked whether they had used cash at any point in the past year, only 13 per cent, 156 of the 1,200 Australians surveyed, said they had not.
Three quarters of us carry cash in our wallets, purses, or phone cases, typically up to $65. Four in ten of us stash away extra in places such as sock drawers.
Different uses
Asked why, about a quarter of us say they want something they can rely on in an emergency. About a fifth use cash to avoid surcharges for paying by card.
Those surcharges were banned on October 1, meaning there’s no longer a financial penalty (and the associated uncertainty about what it is you are paying) attached to using cards.
But there are reasons to think the ban won’t change much for people who prefer to use cash.
For one thing, we already use cards for the bulk of our payments. In 2025, 73 per cent of our payments were made with cards, and only 15 per cent with cash.
The remaining payments might be hard to automate. One in four of our small (below $10) payments are made with cash. About one in seven of us use cash to pay family and friends. About one in seven use cash to ensure privacy. Some of them are victim-survivors, escaping abuse.
Recognising that a good many of us want to use cash (one in five say we would suffer hardship if we couldn’t), at the start of this year the government introduced regulations requiring the major supermarket and service station chains to accept cash.
If they don’t accept cash payments of up to $500 between 7 am and 9 pm, they face fines of up to $218,400 per offence.
To ensure those outlets can get cash, the government introduced legislation in August that gives the RBA extraordinary power to take over and run the operations of the main cash-delivery company, Armaguard, if it runs into problems.
The system is under strain because the less cash that is used, the more it costs to deliver each bundle.
Armaguard has told retailers and banks it’ll have to charge more and has agreed to have the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission regulate its charges.
One day, cash might become extinct. RBA Governor Michele Bullock appeared to set a timeline last year when she told a parliamentary committee, “we’ve got to think that cash is going to be around probably for another 10 years.”
But it’s hard to see us transitioning out that soon. No other country has done it, and Australia didn’t take action to close down the cheque payment system until it accounted for less than 0.1 per cent of payments.
There’s also another reason to expect cash will live on.
Buried in the RBA’s new rules outlawing surcharges for card payments is an explicit provision allowing retailers to offer cash discounts.
Even as the cost of delivering cash to banks and retailers grows, it will remain cheaper than card fees for many of them. They’ll be able to pass that on, and if they don’t, we can ask.