the United States

In stores, Worldpay estimated 2025 US point-of-sale spending at 40% credit cards, 28% debit cards, 17% digital wallets and 10% cash. Federal Reserve diary data show cash still accounted for around 20% of in-person payments in 2025, and more among older, lower-income and rural consumers, so many businesses continue to accept it. Debit transactions can be routed over Visa and Mastercard or over domestic PIN debit networks such as STAR, NYCE, PULSE and ACCEL. EMV chip cards are standard, and tap-to-pay with contactless cards and phone wallets is increasingly common at the till.

The Census Bureau estimated US retail e-commerce sales at USD 340.2 billion in the second quarter of 2026 (seasonally adjusted), 17.1% of total retail sales and 12.2% higher than a year earlier. Large marketplaces include Amazon, Walmart Marketplace, eBay and Etsy. Sales tax is set by states and localities and is normally added at checkout rather than included in displayed prices; since the Supreme Court’s June 2018 South Dakota v. Wayfair decision, states can require out-of-state online sellers to collect it. There is no legal mandate for strong customer authentication, so 3-D Secure is optional and merchants rely on address verification, card security codes and fraud screening, while managing chargeback exposure under card-scheme rules.

There is no single payments regulator. The Federal Reserve runs FedNow and writes Regulation II, which caps debit interchange for card issuers with USD 10 billion or more in assets and requires every debit card to be enabled on at least two unaffiliated networks, a rule extended to card-not-present (online) transactions from July 2023. Banks are supervised by the Fed, the OCC, the FDIC and state regulators, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau enforces federal consumer-protection law. Non-bank firms that transmit money must register with FinCEN as a money services business and, separately, obtain money transmitter licences from the states where they operate. Card data security follows PCI DSS, a card-scheme requirement rather than law.

The FDIC’s 2023 national survey found 95.8% of US households had a bank or credit union account, leaving 4.2% (about 5.6 million households) unbanked, while 14.2% were underbanked. In 2023, 76.4% of households had a Visa, Mastercard, American Express or Discover credit card, 49.7% used non-bank online payment services such as PayPal, Venmo or Cash App, and 48.3% of banked households used mobile banking as their main way to access their account. Unbanked households relied much more on prepaid cards (21.6% versus 5.2% of banked households).