Could Cash Disappear?

Less cash at the checkout does not mean no cash

Cash is losing ground at shop counters while remaining a store of value and a fallback. In many countries, payment use is falling even as the value of notes in circulation rises. These trends can coexist—and they help explain why cash is unlikely to disappear.

Key takeaway. Cash serves purposes that payment apps do not fully replace: resilience, access and privacy. Declining use at the checkout does not remove those needs.

Two different trends

Measured by transactions, cash is in steep decline. In Sweden and Norway it accounts for a small minority of purchases. In Britain it fell from more than half of payments in 2010 to roughly one in eight.

Measured by value in circulation, cash is at or near record levels in the United States, the eurozone and India. There is more than $2 trillion of US currency outstanding, most of it in $100 notes and much of it held abroad.

People are using cash less to pay and more to hold.

What is replacing it

Cards and phones did most of the work in rich countries. In emerging economies, mobile systems leapfrogged cards entirely.

Kenya's M-Pesa, launched in 2007, turned basic phones into wallets. India's UPI made QR-code payments free and instant, and now handles around 20 billion transactions a month. A tea stall in Chennai takes UPI as readily as a supermarket.

The pandemic accelerated the shift. Many shops that stopped taking cash for hygiene reasons never fully returned to it.

The case for letting it go

Cost. Printing, transporting, guarding and counting cash is expensive for banks and retailers.

Crime and tax. Large anonymous payments suit tax evasion and illegal trade. The economist Kenneth Rogoff has argued for withdrawing high-value notes for this reason.

Convenience and records. Digital payments are faster and create a history that helps small businesses get credit.

The case for keeping it

Resilience. Cash works when the power or the network fails. During the blackout across Spain and Portugal in April 2025, card terminals went dark and shops that could trade did so in cash. A global software outage in July 2024 had a similar effect on payment systems.

Sweden, the country closest to cashless, now advises households to keep cash at home for emergencies. Its central bank has warned that the decline went too far.

Inclusion. The elderly, the poor, migrants and people in remote areas rely on cash most. Removing it excludes those with the least.

Privacy. Cash is the only widely available means of payment that leaves no record. Many people value that for ordinary, lawful reasons.