The results of the 2018 Diary of Consumer Payment Choice, released in December 2019, show us that, as a percentage share of all types of payments by number, consumers use debit cards for 28 percent of payments, cash for 26 percent, and credit cards for 23 percent.
I can hear you thinking, "No, that can't be."
"Not in my household. We never use cash. And we always choose credit first to get the points." Your skepticism likely is related to the fact that the diary reports averages for a representative sample of U.S. consumers age 18 and older. That means that all sorts of people are included in the estimates of payment instrument use: highly educated and without a high school diploma, born in the United States and born elsewhere, 18-year-olds and 85-year-olds, people who live in cities and people who live in small towns.
Some of those people are a lot like you. Others, not so much.
For example, if you're reading the Take on Payments blog, I'd venture to guess that your household income was north of the U.S. median of $61,937 in 2018, the year this data was collected. And income matters a lot for consumer behavior.
Let's see what happens when we take income into account for payment instrument use, still using the data from the 2018 Diary of Consumer Payment Choice. Kevin Foster, survey expert at the Atlanta Fed, helped me with this analysis:
- Of payments reported by people in households earning less than $60,000, 32 percent by number were in cash, 31 percent with debit cards, and 15 percent with credit cards.
- Of payments reported by people in households earning more than $60,000, 22 percent were in cash, 27 percent with debit cards, and 28 percent with credit cards.
Note the heavy use of cash by the people in households earning less than $60,000 and the use of credit cards by the group earning more.
When I see data on consumer behavior—the percentage of people who dye their hair, for example—I can't resist asking myself, "Am I average?" Or even, "Am I above average?"—as are the residents of Lake Woebegone. Add a bit of demographic data, and my assessment of how "average" I am changes. Instead of the percentage of all people who dye their hair, compare me to the percentage of women older than 45 who dye their hair, for example.
From hair styling choices to payments choices, not only income but also demographic characteristics like age and gender are important for consumer behavior. That's why the data set for the Diary of Consumer Payment Choice includes a full set of demographic variables (such as age, education, and household size) as well as information about income and employment status. All the data, including a code book explaining all the variables, are available online. So feel free to slice and dice the data as much as you like.
By Claire Greene, a payments risk expert in the Retail Payments Risk Forum at the Atlanta Fed