Research institute · Pew Research Center
42% of US Adults Now Use No Cash in a Typical Week
Cash has stopped being the default for a large minority of adults. Pew's 2026 survey finds 42% of US adults make none of their weekly purchases in cash, nearly double the 2015 share, yet 46% still carry notes they mostly do not spend.
Source published Summarised
Key findings at a glance
- 42% of US adults made none of their weekly purchases in cash in 2026
- 24% said the same in 2015, before the shift accelerated
- 12% still pay for all or almost all of their purchases in cash
- 46% use cash for some of their purchases in a typical week
- 51% of adults under 30 never use cash in a typical week
- 37% of adults aged 50 to 64 never use cash in a typical week
- 33% of adults aged 65 and over never use cash in a typical week
- 58% of households earning $100,000 or more never use cash
- 26% of households earning under $30,000 use cash for all or almost all purchases
- 46% of US adults still carry physical cash always or most of the time
- 29% of under-30s carry physical cash always or most of the time
- 69% of over-65s carry physical cash always or most of the time
What the report covers
Pew Research Center surveyed 9,750 US adults between 26 May and 1 June 2026 on how often they use cash and how often they carry it. The study is the fourth wave in a series running back to 2015, so the headline numbers sit on a genuine time series rather than a single snapshot. Results are broken down by age band and by annual household income.
The top line is a decade-long shift away from cash as a default. In 2026, 42% of US adults said they made none of their weekly purchases in cash, up from 24% in 2015. Over the same period the share paying for all or almost all purchases in cash halved, from 24% to 12%. The middle group, people who use cash sometimes, has stayed broadly stable at around 46%, so the movement has come almost entirely out of heavy cash use.
Underneath the average sit two steep gradients. Higher earners are far more likely to have gone cashless (58% of households on $100,000 or more never use cash, against 24% of those under $30,000), and younger adults lead on abandoning it (51% of under-30s versus 33% of over-65s). Pew also separates carrying cash from spending it, and the two have come apart: 46% of adults still keep cash on them always or most of the time, including a quarter who never actually spend it.
What this means for UK marketers
The caveat first: this is US data, and UK payment behaviour is not identical. What transfers is not the percentage, it is the shape of the change, and the shape is a widening gap between how different segments pay.
The age gradient is steep enough to matter for segmentation. 51% of under-30s make no cash purchases in a typical week against 33% of over-65s, and the carrying figures diverge harder still, 29% against 69%. Any business with a physical footprint (click and collect, trade counters, events, markets) is serving two populations with different defaults. If you are rebuilding checkout or payment flows, that split belongs in the brief rather than in a post-launch fix, which is where most of our ecommerce development projects start.
The income gradient cuts against the cashless assumption. 58% of the highest-earning households never use cash, while 26% of households under $30,000 still use it for all or almost all purchases. Going card-only is therefore a filter on who can buy from you, and it filters hardest at the bottom of the income distribution. That is a commercial decision rather than an operational one, and it deserves to be made deliberately.
The most useful finding for anyone commissioning research is the gap between carrying and using: 26% of people who almost always have cash on them never spend any of it. Stated behaviour and revealed behaviour have separated. Survey questions about payment intent will overstate real usage, which is worth remembering the next time a customer panel tells you what it would do at your checkout.
For UK context, the direction of travel is visible in the retail split. The ONS retail sales bulletin for July 2026 put online at 28.3% of UK retail, a figure we covered in our report on the UK online retail share. Payment preference and channel preference are not the same variable, but they move on the same demographics, which is also what drove the segment differences in our UK shopper loyalty report.
How they got the data
Pew Research Center surveyed 9,750 US adults from 26 May to 1 June 2026. Every respondent is a member of the American Trends Panel, Pew's nationally representative online panel, which is recruited by address-based sampling so that nearly all US adults have a chance of selection. Results are weighted to be representative of the US adult population.
Respondents were asked how much of their typical weekly purchasing they do with cash (all or almost all, some, or none) and, separately, how often they carry physical cash. Comparison points for 2015, 2018 and 2022 come from earlier waves asking the same question, which is what makes the trend readable. Pew publishes the full question wording, topline and methodology statement alongside the analysis.
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From Pew Research Center · published 26/08/2026