The Fed’s cash diary survey is conducted annually to collect data on U.S. consumer shopping and payment behaviors, with supplemental surveys added in the past two years to chart the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The report issued this month presents findings from a survey last October.
It showed U.S. consumers’ cash use “increased slightly” in the first such uptick since 2016, the initial year covered by the reports. That recovery, after a seven-percentage-point drop in cash share in 2020, “could imply that consumers’ transactional use of cash may have reached its floor during the pandemic,” the report said.
