There has been a change of heart.
Americans are growing less reliant on cash, with 42% of US adults saying they never use it for purchases in a typical week, compared to 24% who didn’t carry cash in 2015 — a 75% increase in a little over a decade.
Meanwhile, just 12% said they use cash almost exclusively for their typical weekly purchases — a 50% decline from 2015 when 24% of adults reported that all of their spending was handled with good old-fashioned greenbacks, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.
Higher-income Americans are leading the cashless trend, with 58% of those in households earning $100,000 or more per year reporting they make none of their regular purchases with cash.
People in lower-income households were more likely to use cash, with about a quarter of those earning less than $30,000 per year saying they use cash for all or almost all purchases.
Preference for using cash versus going cashless broke clearly along generational lines.
About half of adults under 30 (51%) say they never use cash, dropping to 46% among those between the ages of 30-49 and 37% among the 50-64 set.
Not surprisingly, Americans 65 or older were the least likely to say they never use paper money, with just 33% going completely cashless.
Despite the persistent decline of cold, hard cash’s cachet, nearly half of Americans (46%) said they carry bills on them always or most of the time, whereas 32% said they rarely or never do.
However, 26% of cash-carriers still said they never use it for their day-to-day purchases.
As banknotes fall further out of favor, the US said goodbye to the smallest denomination of its currency, the humble penny, in 2025 after President Trump canceled production of the one-cent coin.
Some experts believe the nickel could be next.
Pew conducted the survey of US adults between May 26 and June 1, 2026.
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