Surveying Consumers' Use of Personal Checks
October 08, 2026
On December 4, 2025, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System requested public input on the impact of potential changes in check services, check usage, and preferences. Other countries have also debated the future of checks. In fact, in 2009, the Board of the UK Payments Council announced the phasing out of checks by the end of 2018. That shift did not happen, though, and checks are still used in the UK (but far less often than in the past).
The sharp declines in the use of checks and the introduction of new paperless payment services are driving the repeated debates about the future of checks in the United States and other countries. According to the Federal Reserve Payments Study, the number of checks in the United States has declined from 17 billion in 2015 to 9.2 billion in 2024.
Checks are generally classified according to the type of payer who writes the check and the type of payee who receives and deposits the check. On the payer side, the three main types of checks are checks written by consumers, checks issued by businesses, and government-issued checks. This Policy Hub: Macroblog post presents recent findings on consumer checks only. That is, the analysis is restricted to personal checks that are written by consumers to businesses, governments, and other consumers. In this post, I use the terms "consumer checks" and "personal checks" interchangeably.
This post identifies the type of consumers and the spending categories where personal checks are used most often. There are three main takeaways. First, more than half of consumers still use personal checks at least once a year, and about a third use checks at least once a month. Second, use of personal checks rises with age. And third, personal checks are more heavily used in paying for certain services such as paying contractors, plumbers, and electricians, payments for government and municipality taxes, donations to charity and religious purposes, and rent.
What the data tell us
The data are taken from the 2021–25 Survey and Diary of Consumer Payment Choice, which I refer to in this post as the "Diary." The Diary is a sample of US consumers age 18 and older that is conducted yearly during the month of October. The data and yearly summary reports are publicly available and can be downloaded from the Atlanta Fed's website here.
The Diary asks respondents to record all their transactions during three consecutive days in October. The transactions include payments for purchases of goods and services, bill payments, person-to-person payments, ATM withdrawals, deposits, and income receipts. On each assigned diary day, respondents report how much they paid, the means of payment that they used, and the type of merchant or person to whom the payment was made (spending category in what follows). Respondents' three-day diary periods were evenly distributed throughout each day in October.
Consumer use of personal checks: 2021–25
The top two rows in table 1 display the monthly number of checks per survey respondent computed from the data collected in October 2021, October 2022, October 2023, October 2024, and October 2025.
The computations in table 1 adjust the average number of check payments from each respondent's three-day diary survey to one month. Formally, the total number of check payments was divided by three and then multiplied by 31, the number of days in October. Focusing on the weighted data in table 1, the number of checks per respondent has declined from 1.83 per month in 2021 to 1.12 in 2025. This corresponds to an 11.6 percent compound annual decline rate. Note that in 2017–18—less than a decade ago—consumers wrote 3.3 checks per month.
Focusing on bill payments only, the weighted average monthly number of checks per respondent fell from 1.2 in 2021 to 0.69 in 2025, corresponding to a 13 percent compound annual decline rate. The weighted average monthly number of checks per respondent for nonbill payments fell from 0.63 in 2021 to 0.43 in 2025, which corresponds to a 9 percent compound annual decline rate. Therefore, the decline in the use of checks to pay bills was significantly larger than the decline in the use of checks to pay for purchases of goods and services (nonbill payments).
In terms of dollar value, the weighted median dollar value of a check (bills and nonbill combined) increased slowly from $120 in 2021 to $137.58 in 2025. At least part of this increase is due to high inflation affecting both bill and nonbill payments. For bill payments, the weighted median check value increased from $155.12 in 2021 to $165 in 2025. For nonbill payments (for purchases of goods and services), the weighted median check value has increased from $96.50 in 2021 to $100 in 2025.
It's worth noting the reason why table 1 does not display the inflation-adjusted dollar value of checks. Inflation measures, such as the CPI and PCE, are constructed from baskets of goods that consumers typically purchase each month. In contrast, as table 2 shows, checks tend to concentrate on specific spending categories to which the PCE or CPI doesn't assign great weight because they are combined with other goods and services. For example, table 2 shows that very few checks are written to grocery stores; however, the CPI and PCE place a high weight on grocery spending.
Recent statistics on consumer use of personal checks
Figure 1 displays the average monthly number of personal checks by age group.
Figure 1 shows that the per-respondent monthly number of check payments rises with age at an increasing rate. It remains below the unweighted median of 1.37 monthly checks until approximately age 50 and then rises very fast above age 55. Ages 18–24 barely write any check (about 0.077 checks per month). Age group 25–34 writes 0.17 monthly checks. Age group 35–44 writes 0.39 monthly checks. Age group 45–54 writes 0.74 checks. Age group 55–64 writes 1.48 checks. Age group 65–74 writes 2.45 checks, and age group 75 and older writes 4.14 checks per month.
A useful metric for measuring the intensity of use of personal checks is the "incidence" of check use, which means the average number of checks that a consumer writes in a given time period. Figure 2 displays incidence for time periods of 12 months, 30 days, and 3 days.
The top part of figure 2 displays responses to two separate questions: "Have you used a check to make a payment in the past 30 days" and "Have you used a check to make a payment in the past 12 months." These two "No" and "Yes" questions were addressed to all respondents a day before their three-day diary survey began. For the shorter period, about a third (32.54 percent) wrote at least one personal check in a month. For the longer period, over 50 percent (51.29 percent) of the respondents wrote at least one personal check in one year. These findings indicate that more than half of the consumers in the Diary still use personal checks.
The bottom part of figure 2 displays average use of personal checks during the three-day diary survey. This information is taken not from specific questions but instead directly from the actual payments that consumers recorded in their three-day diary survey. That is, actual payments made with personal checks. Figure 2 shows that most consumers (91.22 percent) did not write any check during the three days; 6.04 percent wrote one check in a three-day period; 1.89 percent wrote two checks; down to 0.44 percent who wrote three checks, and so on.
Use of personal checks by spending category
The final investigation focuses on whom consumers pay with personal checks. That is, the focus is on the payees who accept check payments from consumers. Survey respondents were asked to select a merchant/spending category (out of 21 categories) for each payment they made. Table 2 displays the results.
The right-hand column in table 2 provides the most relevant information as it shows the percentage of check payments out of all payments in each spending category. "All payments" in this context means payments made with any method such as cash, checks, credit or debit cards, prepaid cards, mobile apps, payments made directly from a bank account, and income deduction. This column reveals the spending categories most likely to be paid for with personal checks. Note that this column need not sum to 100 percent because this sum has no interpretation, except that a large sum reflects a heavy use of personal checks in some spending categories. (For example, consider that if consumers use checks for half of their payments in three spending categories, this sum would exceed 150 percent.)
Spending category no. 11 (contractor/plumber/electrician) stands out in table 2 because 31.7 percent of all payments in this spending category were made with personal checks due to credit cards' high processing fees, which are very costly to contractors. Therefore, contractors generally ask consumers to avoid paying with cards or even do not accept cards at all. Since contractors serve a relatively small number of customers each day, their risk from accepting personal checks is minimal because they personally know their customers (repairs are generally done at the customer's residence). Similarly, 23.3 percent of all payments made in spending category no. 19 (government taxes) were also made with personal checks. This is because government and local municipalities are obligated to reduce taxpayer costs and therefore tend to surcharge consumers who wish to pay with credit cards. The same applies to spending category no. 17 (charitable/religious donations), where 21.5 percent of all donations are made with personal checks to avoid having the receiving institutions paying high credit card processing fees. Finally, spending category no. 14 (rent) involves property owners who refuse to accept credit cards for rent payments but instead accept personal checks or bank account transfers. Therefore, personal check payments account for 12.5 percent of all rent payments.
The right-hand column in table 2 also reveals that personal checks are hardly used in spending categories nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 9. This is because merchants in these spending categories serve many customers each hour and cannot allow checks to slow down the checkout process. In addition, because merchants in these categories know very little about their customers, merchants in these spending categories would find it difficult to avoid receiving bad checks.
Finally, the middle column in table 2 displays the percentage of check payments in each spending category out of all payments that are made with personal checks (in all spending categories). It shows that 16.1 percent of all checks are written to no. 17 (charitable/religious donations). The percentage of checks (out of all check payments) in spending categories no. 8 (nongovernment utility) and no. 15 (mortgage/insurance/credit card) were 14.7 percent and 14.0 percent, respectively.
Summary
Consumer use of personal checks continues to decline. This corresponds to a general decline in the use of all types of checks, although checks issued by businesses decline at a slower rate than consumer checks. Despite the continuing decline in consumer use of personal checks over the years (table 1), some consumer types and particular merchant/spending categories use personal checks frequently. On the consumer side, use of personal checks rises with age at an increasing rate (figure 1). Over a 12-month period, over 50 percent of consumers wrote at least one personal check (figure 2), a percentage that drops to almost a third of consumers for payments made over a period of 30 days.
Most payments made with personal checks tend to concentrate on specific spending categories (table 2). The largest use of personal checks (as a percentage of payments made with all payment methods in each spending category) is in the contractor/plumber/electrician category. The second largest use is payments made in the government taxes spending category, followed by payments made for donations to charity and religious institutions and then rent.
What's next? The use of personal checks will likely continue to decline. But how much? We will have to wait for the results from the 2026 Survey and Diary of Consumer Payment Choice, which will be in the field during October 2026.
Author's note: I would like to thank Tom Heintjes and Camelia Minoiu for most valuable comments and suggestions on earlier drafts and Whitney Strifler for the interactive tables and charts.