Last week, the Federal Reserve released new information about card payments and alternative payment methods by consumers and businesses in the United States. Specifically, the latest Federal Reserve Payments Study
looks at general-purpose (GP) credit, non-prepaid debit, and prepaid debit card use. At a high level, the data show that consumers are continuing to dominate the card space, with 94 percent of GP card payments and 81 percent of spending on GP cards in 2022.
Overall, most card payments—58 percent—were made using non-prepaid debit cards, while credit cards were used for 36 percent of payments, and 6 percent of payments involved prepaid debit cards.
Other notable takeaways:
- Non-prepaid debit cards are almost exclusively a consumer product, with 97 percent of payments with these cards by number and 91 percent by value attributed to consumers.
- Credit cards are the card type most used by businesses, as they account for 9 percent of credit card payments by number and 26 percent by value in 2022. The average credit card payment by a business—$259—is almost three times the size of the average credit card payment by a consumer at $78. Some of these payments by businesses are likely payments that in past years would have been made with paper checks.
- From 2015 to 2022, the share of prepaid debit card payments made by businesses drifted up, rising from 1 percent to 7 percent by number and from 3 percent to 20 percent by value. The increase in business use of these cards implies that they can be an attractive way for managing employee spending, including travel reimbursement, petty cash, and fuel. Like credit cards, the average value of a prepaid card payment by a business—$114—was more than three times the size of the average prepaid card payment by a consumer at $34.
The charts below compare business and consumer use by card types and show, as noted above, the importance of consumers in the card space.
By Claire Greene, center director, Atlanta Fed Payments Forum