The checks I received are among the billions sent annually. In 2021, consumers and businesses sent 11.1 billion checks, totaling $27.44 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve Payment Study, released March 2025. This was less than the 13.6 billion checks sent in 2018, but it’s arguably still about 11 billion too many. The value of consumer checks averaged $1,249, and business checks averaged $3,601, the Fed found. Business checks were 76% of the total value of commercial checks in 2021.
The billions of checks sent annually could fall even further as the federal government transitions away from checks to electronic payments for both disbursements and collections, with limited exceptions, following Executive Order 14247. This could force the adoption of electronic payments or other alternatives to users who have been resistant to shifting in the past, similar to what happened during the coronavirus payment disbursement.
“Checks have been declining dramatically on the consumer side. Many banks don't issue checkbooks anymore. When you open an account, you have to ask and order checks,” Jim Colassano, the business product management executive for The Clearing House’s RTP Network, told me. Consumers were able to shift away from checks for their person-to-person, or P2P, payments, aided by apps and websites that have become widespread and are easy to use. (This comment reminded me that I wanted to run a social experiment when I paid people back with checks instead of Venmo.)
Checks are significantly more entrenched in the commercial space. One reason why is that companies “may experience additional costs and barriers to adopting electronic payments, including the need to modernize their treasury practices, accounting processes, and infrastructures for accepting and disbursing payments,” according to the Fed.
For its part, The Clearing House sees itself as the builder of payments infrastructure that works best in digital environments, Jim said. When The Clearing House launched the RTP Network in 2017, it was the first new payment rail in the United States in four decades.
But it’s not just enough to build faster payment rails; there’s also the matter of the pace of adoption. The launch of these rails coincided with broader shifts in technology, including modern technology options available to enterprises of all sizes and the need to address end-of-life concerns in legacy systems. But while some early adopters and newer companies have been able to leverage modern payment rails, Jim said there’s a lot of legacy infrastructure in place that needs to be upgraded.
One example is insurance companies, which still issue a lot of checks. If an insurer wants to add instant payment capabilities, it’s sometimes done through new purchases or large investments, since its legacy infrastructure and internal processes were built to support checks.
Insurance companies embody another reason why businesses use checks: disbursing episodic payments to individuals where their account information isn’t readily available — that’s me, filling out a W-9 at a soccer field because I like getting paid more than I hate checks.
“I think there's a lot of cases where, if you're getting paid, [your counterparty] may write a check because they know that you'll be able to take it and they don't have your account information,” said Luther Liang, senior vice president and head of product at Grasshopper Bank, the bank unit of New York-based Grasshopper Bancorp. “The counterparty information sharing is a big issue.”
Grasshopper, which had $1.4 billion in assets at the end of the third quarter of 2025, started as a digital-only commercial bank and has since added consumer accounts through its acquisition of Auto Club Trust FSB. Grasshopper itself agreed to be acquired by nonbank digital lender Enova International at the beginning of December; this conversation was conducted in advance of that announcement.
Grasshopper's bill pay suite includes automatic upgrades of checks to ACH if the counterparty is in their system. Luther said the bank supports instant payment rails, has integrations with Venmo and CashApp for micro or sole proprietors, and has marketplace partnerships with Ramp and Sky Systemz for merchant card acceptance for professional service firms and startups.
Luther said he had received and deposited a check in November. “It came in a New York State Department of Taxation envelope, which is never fun to receive, but at least they were paying me this time.”
It’s not solely banks’ fault that billions of checks are still flying through our financial system. But I still wonder what banks could do to help their check-using customers migrate away from them. What concerted efforts are banks taking to wean their customers away from checks, explain their vulnerabilities and price the payments to incentivize behavior?
Luther said that bank clients care about a payment’s cost, speed and other attributes, like revocability. But they’re not versed with the jargon and regulation; they don’t always know the difference between wires, ACH, RTP and FedNow. Grasshopper has included messaging about the different types of attributes as part of its payment strategy to help clients make an informed decision between payment types.
And even though The Clearing House operates RTP, it is also a payments company whose historic founding includes check processing. They provide optionality to customers, and that includes checks.
“As long as there are checks out there to be cleared, we will be clearing them,” Jim said. “But if you provide an easy something as easy as a check for consumers and businesses to use, that's when you're going to start to see a real demise. Any other way of doing it is going to have a limited result.”
