Cash remains the most widely accepted payment method among companies with physical points of sale in the euro area, but mobile payment acceptance has almost doubled in two years, according to a new European Central Bank survey.
The ECB said 92% of surveyed companies accepted cash in 2026, up from 90% in 2024. Card acceptance was broadly unchanged at 88%, while the share accepting mobile payments rose from 36% to 68% over the same period.
The survey covered 8,205 companies across all 21 euro-area countries. Interviews were conducted between February and April 2026 among businesses with at least one employee in retail trade, restaurants and cafés, hotels, and arts, entertainment and recreation. The results therefore describe acceptance within those sectors rather than every euro-area business or the share of transactions completed with each method.
Mobile acceptance closes part of the gap
The 32-percentage-point rise in mobile acceptance is the clearest change in the headline findings. It indicates that more merchants can support mobile payment options, but it does not show that mobile payments have displaced cards or cash at checkout. Acceptance measures availability, not transaction volume or customer preference.
For payment service providers, the distinction matters. A merchant may support several methods at once, and broader mobile acceptance can reflect upgrades to existing card terminals or checkout software rather than a separate payment infrastructure. The ECB release does not allocate the increase among wallets, account-to-account services or other mobile products.
The survey also found that 25% of companies had taken steps to promote digital payments. Examples included investing in tills that accept cashless payments or reducing the number of cash-accepting tills. Separately, 13% of companies reported introducing self-checkout terminals.
Cash retains a broad merchant footprint
The rebound in cash acceptance suggests that digitisation is expanding payment choice rather than producing a uniform move away from notes and coins. Companies cited consumer preference, security and ease of handling among their leading considerations when deciding which methods to accept. They also identified privacy and reliability as important advantages of cash compared with digital methods.
Those findings present a dual operating requirement for merchants and providers. Digital acceptance must be convenient and resilient, while cash handling remains relevant to a large majority of physical businesses in the covered sectors. Providers selling unified checkout or merchant-management systems may therefore need to support reconciliation across cash, cards and mobile options instead of treating any one method as a complete replacement.
What the figures do not establish
The survey does not measure the value or number of payments made with each method, nor does it demonstrate that every business categorized as accepting mobile payments offers the same customer experience. It also does not establish whether reported digital-payment investments caused the rise in mobile acceptance.
The practical signal is narrower: payment availability at physical businesses is becoming more digitally diverse, while cash retains the widest reported acceptance. For merchants, processors and wallet providers, competitive positioning will depend not only on enabling another payment button, but also on reliability, straightforward handling and alignment with how customers choose to pay.