Last month, Take On Payments looked at consumer opinions and preferences to understand the decline in consumer payments made by check—down to 2.5 percent of payments in 2024.

Consumers avoid using checks for many reasons, as reported in the Survey and Diary of Consumer Payment Choice. Consumers rated checks poorly for convenience, security, and speed of payment. Instead, we say we prefer to use cards or an electronic method to pay both purchases and bills.

But there's another side to the decrease in the share of consumer payments via check: the payee's increased capacity to be paid by other means. Payers are constrained by what the payee (another person, business, or government) is willing or able to accept. Innovations in payments acceptance are reflected in the past 10 years of consumer check use.

For both person-to-person (P2P) payments and consumer-to-business/government bill pay, check use has declined from 2015.

Person-to-person payments

In 2015, 17 percent of payments to another person were via a check. In 2024, that share is down to 6 percent. Ten years ago, people were mostly paying each other via paper payment methods: 87 percent of P2P payments were with cash, checks, or money orders in 2015. Fast forward to 2024, and that share is down to 45 percent, with 55 percent of P2P payments via a card, bank transfer, or money stored in an app. This change reflects the rise of user-friendly payment apps that our friends, families, babysitters, and landscapers can use to accept money from us.

Bill payments

Businesses also have improved their ability to accept other-than-check means of payment, resulting in a decline in check use for bill pay. As you can see below, payees that, in the past, found it difficult to accept card and electronic payments have evolved. For example, contractors might take payments via mobile app. From 2015 to 2024, their share of payments by check dropped by half from 53 percent to 27 percent. Some churches—another example—instituted electronic collection baskets with automatic weekly contributions. Checks to charities fell from 33 percent in 2015 to 20 percent in 2024.

This new capacity of payees can trickle down into consumer behavior. For example, even the oldest consumers are less likely to use checks compared to a decade ago.

And, with increasing acceptance of other payment methods, consumers overall could be less likely to think they need checks on hand, in part because today we can obtain low-cost accounts without check-writing privileges. For the one-third of consumers who did not have paper checks in 2024, paying with a check was not happening.

So far, check substitutes are not universally reliable—like when my collection of mobile payment apps doesn't include the app preferred by a friend. Our quick solution: he mailed me a check. This kind of unconditional acceptance, I believe, is what makes the paper check an enduring app.

Portrait photo of Claire Greene
By Claire Greene, center director, Atlanta Fed Payments Forum