Germans are paying cashless more and more often, according to Heise — the latest data point in a shift that has been eroding one of Europe's most stubborn cash cultures for a decade.
Germany's attachment to banknotes was long treated as a national trait rather than a preference: low card acceptance in small shops, a strong privacy instinct, and a domestic card scheme, girocard, built around debit rather than credit. That combination made the country an outlier among rich economies, and it made forecasts of a cashless Germany look reliably premature.
The mechanism of change has been mundane rather than dramatic. Contactless terminals spread through retail, card and wallet payments became the default at the till, and habits formed during the pandemic years stuck. The Bundesbank's periodic survey of payment behaviour has recorded cash losing share of transactions for years; in its most recently published edition, notes and coins accounted for roughly half of them, down from a clear majority a few years earlier.
The consequences extend past the checkout. Falling cash use changes the economics of ATMs and cash-in-transit logistics, sharpens the debate over merchant acceptance and surcharges, and feeds into the European Central Bank's work on a digital euro — a project whose selling point is partly the fear that private payment rails could leave public money marginal. In a country that once measured its attachment to cash in surveys, the interesting question is no longer whether the shift is happening, but how fast — and who it leaves behind.
