TOP 10 Countries by Share of Digital Payments in Consumer Transactions (2025)

Sweden — cards/wallets + instant transfers as the daily default

Estimated 2025 digital payments share in consumer transactions: ≈ 99.2%.

In the Sveriges Riksbank Payments Report, it is noted that “around 1 in 10” offline purchases are made in cash; the report also highlights the metric that “only 10% paid cash for their latest offline purchase” (Riksbank survey evidence).

The same report underscores the role of instant person-to-person payments via Swish (launched in 2012) in displacing cash in P2P use cases and expanding into e-commerce, retail, and the public sector.

Method note: the Riksbank “latest purchase” figure is survey-based, while the ≈99.2% value is a harmonised “all consumer transactions by count” estimate for the ranking; differences in level are explainable by scope and unit-of-measure differences.

Norway — minimal cash usage and rising mobile payments

Estimated 2025 share: ≈ 99.0%.

Norges Bank materials based on the 2025 survey on payment habits indicate extremely low cash usage: around 2% of payments by count (and about 1% by value), with cards and mobile payments dominating everyday scenarios.

On the infrastructure side, Norway is part of the group where instant transfers and mobile solutions (for example, Vipps) are embedded in mass-market habits.

Netherlands — high “card intensity” with a still-visible (but declining) cash role at checkout

Estimated 2025 share: ≈ 98.8%.

According to De Nederlandsche Bank (joint payments observation/communication), in 2024 the “at checkout” cash share was 19%, while the bulk of payments were by debit card (“pin”, around 80%); credit card was under 1%.

The same material highlights that for P2P (“to each other”) the share of electronic transfers can be higher by value than by count, which matters when interpreting a “digital share” across all consumer transactions.

Denmark — mix of cards, wallets, and national P2P solutions

Estimated 2025 share: ≈ 98.6%.

In Danmarks Nationalbank’s report on payments resilience, the structure of physical retail payments shows that in 2023 cash accounted for roughly 11% in physical trade (in the charted “by count” shares), with payment cards and wallets dominating.

The same source notes a high share of “card-based wallets” in card payments (about 39% in Q2 2025).

From an instant-payments perspective, the Nordics rely on shared rails and mobile solutions; in Denmark, MobilePay is part of the ecosystem described in “Payments in the Nordics” (built from central-bank data across the region).

Finland — “digital majority” in consumer habits and strong euro-area infrastructure

Estimated 2025 share: ≈ 98.4%.

Based on a cited annual Bank of Finland consumer survey for 2024: 83% of respondents named payment cards as their most frequently used method; “mobile payment” (6%) and cash (7%) were named as the “most frequent method” with similar shares; in total, 90% said they mainly use cards or mobile payments.

Nordic central-bank overviews emphasize Finland’s deep integration into euro-area payments infrastructure and the presence of instant rails anchored in pan-European systems.

South Korea — credit cards dominate; mobile instruments at scale

Estimated 2025 share: ≈ 98.2%.

An official Bank of Korea release reporting results of the 2024 payment-habits survey (published 2025-03-25) provides the “by count” structure of transactions: credit cards (46.2%), debit cards (16.4%), cash (15.9%), mobile cards (12.9%), then account transfers (3.7%), prepaid instruments (2.7%), and other.

If “digital” is interpreted as all non-cash instruments (cards/mobile/transfers/prepaid), the implied digital share in that observed distribution exceeds 80% by count, consistent with South Korea’s high position in digitalisation rankings.

China — super-apps, QR ecosystems, and a very broad telecom base

Estimated 2025 share: ≈ 98.0%.

As technological context, China’s National Bureau of Statistics reports the scale of telecom and internet infrastructure: by end-2024 there were around 1.79 billion mobile subscriptions, internet coverage of 78.6%, and mobile phone coverage of 127.1 per 100 people; it also reports the scale of 4G/5G base stations and the number of 5G subscribers.

This is not a direct measure of “digital payments share”, but it is a strong explanatory factor for high digitalisation of consumer payments (mass-market feasibility of mobile wallets and QR payments).

Singapore — digital rails, high financial access, and strong public infrastructure

Estimated 2025 share: ≈ 97.8%.

Within this study, it was not possible to obtain a direct official “cash vs digital” shares summary from the Monetary Authority of Singapore statistics section: the semi-annual retail payment statistics page returned a service unavailability message.

Therefore, Singapore’s “digital payments share” uses the value from the harmonised cross-country ranking, while interpretation relies on the ranking logic (thin cash share under high digital availability).

United Kingdom — remote banking + cards; cash below 10% by count

Estimated 2025 share: ≈ 97.6%.

In UK Finance’s “UK Payment Markets 2025” summary (data for 2024), cash is reported to have been 9% of all payments by count in 2024, continuing a long downward trend (58% in 2009 → 48% in 2014 → 23% in 2019 → 9% in 2024).

The same document highlights the scale of card payments and remote banking instruments as key components of the overall payments mix.

Australia — strong shift to cashless, alongside policy focus on cash access

Estimated 2025 share: ≈ 97.4%.

In an Australian Treasury consultation paper on mandating cash acceptance, a reference is made to the central bank’s Consumer Payments Survey: in 2022, 13% of transactions were cash and 87% were electronic. The document also underlines cash as a resilience backstop (outages/disasters) and highlights digital exclusion risks for some groups.