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Cash or Card Is a Different Question in Every Country

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Coins and small banknotes lying beside an unlit card terminal at a supermarket checkout

Coins and small banknotes lying beside an unlit card terminal at a supermarket checkout

On 28 May 2026 Sweden, the country most often produced as evidence that cash is finished, wrote a law requiring shops to take it. Lag (2026:769) obliges grocery retailers and pharmacies to accept notes and coins at any physical outlet with a staffed till. It came into force on 1 July. The obligation is capped at a tenth of the price base amount, the index the government resets each year, and at 25 coins per transaction, so nobody has to count out a bucket of change. A shop can decline if security cannot be maintained on the premises, or if the cost of handling cash would threaten its ability to stay open, and it can refuse any individual sale where there is an acceptable reason, suspicion of money laundering being the example the government offered.

The odd part is enforcement of the shop duty. There isn't any. The Riksdag finance committee's report records the government's position that, given the good rate of cash acceptance among the businesses concerned, no supervisory structure is needed for now on that side of the act, and that the firms themselves should see to it. The banking half of the same package is supervised properly: Post- och telestyrelsen checks whether credit institutions meet their cash obligations, and Finansinspektionen can act against those that fall short. So Sweden has created a retail duty with no inspector and no penalty, in a country where the six largest credit institutions have been obliged to provide cash services since January 2021, and where the rule on deposit points is written as a piece of geography: no more than 1.22 per cent of the population may live further than 25 kilometres from one.

Cash is not disappearing, it is changing job

The Swedish law lands in the middle of a shift that is usually described wrongly. In April 2026 the Bank for International Settlements published its reading of the 2024 Red Book statistics, collected from the member jurisdictions of its payments committee, under a title that gives the game away: "Tap a card, pay by phone, but cash still holds its own". Cashless payments keep growing. Cash withdrawals keep falling. And yet the stock of cash in circulation has largely stabilised. People withdraw less often and in larger amounts, which means paper is drifting away from being the way you buy lunch and towards being the way you hold value.

The spread between countries is enormous, and it does not track wealth. Measured against GDP, cash in circulation in 2024 was highest in Japan at 21 per cent and Hong Kong at 19 per cent, and lowest in Sweden at 0.9 per cent and Türkiye at 1 per cent. Annual cash withdrawals per person ranged from four in Sweden and four in India to 42 in Saudi Arabia. Sweden and India reach the same number from opposite directions, and the number alone will not tell you which is which.

India's other figure is the one to keep. The average instant payment there in 2024 was worth 21 US dollars, the smallest in the entire set. Sweden's was 49. Japan's was 3,380. An instant transfer in Japan is how you move serious money; in India it is how you buy a cup of tea. Fast payments now account for roughly half of all cashless payments across emerging economies, and those systems are domestic by construction, settling between accounts at local banks. Cross-border links exist, including the one joining India's UPI to Singapore's PayNow in 2023, but they connect two national systems to each other rather than opening either to all comers. A QR code that half the queue is using is not, by design, something a foreign card is inside.

A handwritten card-only sign taped inside a shop window

Japan: the most cash-heavy economy measured, and a statute about coins

Japan keeps confusing people because both halves of its reputation are true at once. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry put the country's cashless ratio for 2025 at 58.0 per cent, and that headline arrives on a new ruler. METI switched this year to a domestic indicator whose denominator is household consumption with the imputed rent of owner-occupied housing taken out, a sum the ministry puts at about 57 trillion yen, or some 17 per cent. On the international-comparison basis used for every earlier year, which measures against private final consumption, 2025 comes out at 46.3 per cent, against 42.8 per cent in 2024. Credit cards account for 82.7 per cent of the cashless total and QR-code payments for 10.2 per cent. The interim target of 65 per cent by 2030 and the long-term aim of 80 per cent are both set on the new domestic indicator, with 65 domestic corresponding to 55 international, which is a government's way of saying there is a long way left. More than half of Japanese consumer spending is still settled by something other than a card, an e-money balance or a code, and a large part of that is cash, in the economy holding the largest stock of cash relative to its size of any that the BIS measures.

Japan also has the most entertaining statute in this field. Article 7 of the Act on Currency Units and Issuance of Coins provides that coins are legal tender only up to twenty times their face value. The same Act sets no equivalent ceiling for Bank of Japan notes. So a shopkeeper handed twenty-one ten-yen coins is entitled to hand one back. Nobody actually walks into that, but it is a clean illustration of what legal tender does: it governs how an existing debt gets discharged, and says nothing about what a shop has to agree to sell you in the first place.

Germany: half the transactions, a third of the money

Germany is a cash country converging on the euro-area average without having got there. The European Central Bank's 2024 SPACE survey, the currency union's standard measurement, found cash used in 52 per cent of point-of-sale transactions across the euro area but only 39 per cent of the value. Germany's own figures were 53 per cent and 30 per cent: more than half of shop transactions, under a third of the money. Twenty-eight per cent of Germans said they prefer cash, against 22 per cent across the euro area, and 74 per cent of German payments between private individuals were made in cash, the highest share in the bloc.

What is moving faster than German habits is German acceptance. The ECB's companion survey of firms found 88 per cent of euro-area companies accepting cash in 2024, down from 96 per cent in 2021, with acceptance running at 99 per cent in supermarkets and 97 per cent at petrol stations but 87 per cent in shops selling durable goods. Consumers reported cash accepted in 95 per cent of their point-of-sale transactions. Meanwhile reported acceptance of cashless methods rose nine percentage points in Germany in two years, and 89 per cent of euro-area point-of-sale transactions could now have been completed without cash. Both doors are narrowing at the same time: 24 per cent of euro-area consumers said that in the past month the method they would have preferred was not always offered.

An open cash box of coins and notes next to a printed QR code on a market stall table

Legal tender is not the protection people think it is

The European Commission's 2010 recommendation on the scope of legal tender is unusually plain about all this, with one caveat that changes how much comfort to take from it. A recommendation is not binding law, which is why every clause below says "should". It is nevertheless still the operative EU statement, because the binding regulation the Commission proposed in June 2023 has not been enacted. Parliament's economic and monetary affairs committee has adopted its position and the Council has adopted a negotiating position, and as of mid-2026 the file is still moving.

Acceptance of euro notes and coins in retail should be the rule. Refusal should be possible only on good-faith grounds, the example given being a retailer with no change available. High-denomination notes should be accepted, unless the face value is disproportionate to the sum owed. Then comes the clause that swallows the rest. In the recommendation's own words, the creditor of a payment obligation "cannot refuse euro banknotes and coins unless the parties have agreed on other means of payment". A card-only sign on the door, accepted by walking in, is widely read as that agreement. The recommendation does not say so, and pinning down exactly that ambiguity is part of why a binding regulation was proposed in the first place.

Britain, outside the euro and outside that recommendation, keeps older machinery on the books. Section 2 of the Coinage Act 1971, in the form the Currency Act 1983 substituted for the original, makes bronze coins legal tender only for payments up to 20 pence, cupro-nickel or silver coins of ten pence and under up to five pounds, and the larger cupro-nickel or silver denominations up to ten pounds. Gold coins are legal tender for any amount, provided their weight has not fallen below the least current weight, a provision that has sat there since 1983 waiting for someone to try it.

The practical residue is dull and useful. The note you can spend is the note the till can change. Every jurisdiction that has written down a good-faith exception has written down the same one. Break large notes where there is a float and a queue that expects it, at supermarkets, chain pharmacies, railway ticket offices and bank counters, and keep the small denominations for taxis, markets, rural buses and anywhere a person is working out of a cash box.

China and Morocco: two kinds of closed system

China's wallets sit inside a licensing perimeter drawn by statute. State Council Order 768, the Regulations on the Supervision and Administration of Non-bank Payment Institutions, was passed at the State Council's 19th executive meeting on 24 November 2023, signed by the premier and published that December, and took effect on 1 May 2024. It defines a non-bank payment institution as a company established inside mainland China holding a payment business licence, supervised by the People's Bank of China, and it provides that a non-bank institution based outside the mainland wishing to offer cross-border payment services to users inside it must establish a licensed institution inside the mainland unless the state provides otherwise. That is the legal shape of what people meet on the ground. Whatever accommodations exist for foreign visitors are accommodations made at that perimeter, and not an open standard your own bank belongs to.

Morocco makes a related point through the currency itself. The Office des Changes states that importing and exporting dirhams is prohibited, with an allowance for travelling individuals to carry no more than 2,000 dirhams in banknotes so they can meet expenses on their return. Foreign money runs the other way. The Office's general instruction on exchange operations lets residents and non-residents alike bring payment instruments denominated in foreign currency into Morocco with no ceiling at all, and requires a written declaration to the border customs service only where the value is 100,000 dirhams or more. Below that the declaration is voluntary, and for a non-resident it stays valid for six months. On departure a non-resident may take out what they brought in, evidenced by that import declaration, and a declaration is again compulsory at or above the same 100,000 dirham line. What none of it offers is a way to keep dirhams. Non-residents are told to change foreign currency into dirhams for what they spend in the country, so you convert after you land, and whatever is left at the end goes home as a souvenir. The Moroccan National Tourist Office's own summary of payment is more candid than most official guidance: exchange counters will want your passport, ATMs are widespread, and Visa or Mastercard, it says, are "accepted by most hotels, some restaurants, shops and petrol stations". "Some restaurants" is the honest phrase in that sentence.

Four things that fail, not two

Cash or card is the wrong question at the border. The useful one is which of four things will fail, and where. The card fails when the terminal is domestic-only, or wants a PIN your card was never issued with. The phone fails when the wallet is a national scheme you cannot join. The cash fails when the note is too large for the float. The currency fails when you cannot carry it out or change it back. A country can be excellent on three of those and hopeless on the fourth, and its general reputation for being modern or old-fashioned predicts almost nothing about which.

Sweden's new law is the neatest illustration available. A parliament that watched cash acceptance slide for two decades has now ordered food shops and pharmacies to take notes and coins, capped the duty at a tenth of an index figure and 25 coins, excused anyone whose handling costs put the shop itself at risk of closing, and appointed nobody at all to check that half of it. A state can require a shop to accept your money. It has not worked out how to make the shop want it. Everywhere else, that argument gets settled at the till, one transaction at a time, by whoever turned up carrying a second method.

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