ACH Payments Statistics 2026
By Axis Intelligence Research
Co-author: Sarah Davis | Last updated: August 23, 2026 | License: CC BY 4.0
The ACH Network moved 35.19 billion payments worth $93.00 trillion in 2025, and added 9.3 billion more payments worth $25.9 trillion in the second quarter of 2026 alone. According to Axis Intelligence Research, the network’s single-year volume increase in 2025 was 3.49 times the entire combined annual output of RTP and FedNow.
Quick Answer
The ACH Network processed 35.19 billion payments valued at $93.00 trillion in 2025, up 4.9% in volume and 7.9% in value over 2024 (Nacha). Same Day ACH reached 1.45 billion payments worth $3.92 trillion, growing 16.7% in volume. According to Axis Intelligence Research, the Axis ACH Modernization Index (AMI) stands at 129.0 for 2025, against a 2023 baseline of 100.
Key Findings
- According to Nacha’s 2025 full-year results published January 28, 2026, the ACH Network handled 35.19 billion payments valued at $93.00 trillion, a 4.9% volume increase over 2024.
- According to Axis Intelligence Research, the ACH Network’s 2025 volume increase of 1.59 billion payments was 3.49 times the combined 455.6 million payments carried by RTP and FedNow across all of 2025.
- According to Axis Intelligence Research, the Axis ACH Modernization Index reads 129.0 for 2025, up from 116.6 in 2024 and a 2023 baseline of 100.
- According to Nacha’s second-quarter 2026 release dated July 30, 2026, Same Day ACH volume rose 29.5% year over year to 435.7 million payments valued at $1.3 trillion.
- According to Axis Intelligence Research, Same Day ACH accounted for 4.61% of all ACH Network payments in the first half of 2026, up from 2.71% in full-year 2023.
How Many ACH Payments Were Made in 2025?
The ACH Network handled 35.19 billion payments valued at $93.00 trillion in 2025. Volume rose 4.9% and value rose 7.9% over 2024, according to Nacha’s full-year results published January 28, 2026. That was the thirteenth consecutive year in which ACH value grew by more than $1 trillion.
Two records fell in the fourth quarter. December 2025 produced the highest monthly volume in network history at 3.22 billion payments, and November 2025 set an average daily record of 151 million payments per day.
ACH Network Volume and Value, 2022–2025
| Year | Payments (billions) | Value ($ trillions) | Volume change | Value change | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 30.00 | 77.0 | — | — | Nacha |
| 2023 | 31.50 | 80.1 | +4.8% | +4.4% | Nacha |
| 2024 | 33.60 | 86.2 | +6.7% | +7.6% | Nacha |
| 2025 | 35.19 | 93.00 | +4.9% | +7.9% | Nacha |
Source: Nacha ACH Network Volume and Value Statistics, retrieved August 22, 2026.
The headline number understates total ACH activity. Nacha separately reported 6.9 billion “off-Network” payments in 2025 — mostly on-us transactions where the originating and receiving institution are the same, which never reach an ACH Operator. Counting those, total ACH payment volume in 2025 was 42.1 billion, up 4.6%. Most published ACH statistics quote 35.2 billion without mentioning the 42.1 billion figure exists. Both are correct; they measure different things, and which one belongs in a given sentence depends on whether the question is about the network or about the payment method.
The 2025 split between debits and credits is the part treasury teams tend to want: 19.59 billion debits worth $31.68 trillion, and 15.60 billion credits worth $61.32 trillion. Credits are 44% of the count and 66% of the money.
First Half of 2026
The network handled 18.2 billion payments worth nearly $50 trillion in the first half of 2026, up 5.5% in volume and 10.2% in value. Second-quarter volume alone was 9.3 billion payments valued at $25.9 trillion, increases of 6.2% and 11.1%, per Nacha’s Q2 2026 release.
Value is growing at roughly twice the rate of volume. That gap is the whole story of the current cycle, and the sections below take it apart.
Sarah Davis: The 4.9% growth line gets read as a mature rail ticking along. Look at the value column instead. Payments grew 4.9% while dollars grew 7.9%, and in Q2 2026 the spread widened to 6.2% against 11.1%. Something bigger is being pushed through the same pipe. In practice that means invoice settlement and cash concentration — flows that used to leave the building as a wire, with a wire’s fee attached.
Source: Axis Intelligence Research — CC BY 4.0
Did Instant Payments Take Volume Away From ACH?
Not yet in absolute terms, and the arithmetic is not close. This is where most ACH coverage stops at a vibe, so Axis Intelligence Research built a figure for it.
The Rail Displacement Ratio (RDR)
RDR = (annual increase in ACH Network payments) ÷ (combined annual payments settled on RTP and FedNow)
An RDR above 1.0 means the ACH Network’s growth alone exceeded the entire output of both instant rails that year. Inputs are payment counts only — no value figures are mixed in, because ACH counts include debits while RTP and FedNow are credit-push systems, and averaging their values would produce a number that means nothing.
| Year | ACH volume increase | RTP payments | FedNow payments | Combined instant | RDR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 2,100,000,000 | 342,638,985 | 1,505,250 | 344,144,235 | 6.10 |
| 2025 | 1,590,000,000 | 447,207,091 | 8,413,402 | 455,620,493 | 3.49 |
Sources: Nacha (ACH volumes); The Clearing House RTP annual statistics; Federal Reserve FedNow volume and value statistics. Ratio calculated by Axis Intelligence Research, retrieved August 22, 2026.
Read it in both directions, because both directions are true. In 2025 the ACH Network still added three and a half payments for every single payment the instant rails carried in total. And the ratio nearly halved in one year, from 6.10 to 3.49. Displacement is real and measurable at the margin; it is nowhere near the rail switch that the 2023 FedNow launch coverage implied.
For scale on the base: the ACH Network’s 2025 volume was 77.2 times the combined RTP and FedNow volume, and its value was 40.3 times their combined value. The RTP network has cleared over 1.7 billion transactions and $3.2 trillion cumulatively since 2017 — roughly eighteen days of ACH volume.
Where instant rails are genuinely winning is average ticket size and use case, not count. Axis Intelligence Research calculates an average FedNow payment of $54,957 in Q2 2026 against an average RTP payment of $4,056 and an average ACH payment of $2,747 across the first half of 2026. FedNow is being used for a different job than ACH is, which is why the displacement is happening in slices — payroll deferrals, gig payouts, closing funds — rather than across the board.
Sarah Davis: Every quarter someone publishes a chart with the FedNow line going vertical and no y-axis worth reading. FedNow settled 4.99 million payments in Q2 2026. The ACH Network settled 9.3 billion. Both grew. One of those numbers is a rounding error against the other, and the honest framing is that instant rails are taking specific high-urgency flows off ACH while ACH keeps absorbing everything checks and wires are shedding.
Related Axis coverage: Real-Time Payments Statistics covers RTP and FedNow adoption in depth.
What Is the Axis ACH Modernization Index?
Volume growth alone cannot tell you whether a payment rail is modernizing or just getting bigger. A network can add a billion payments a year and still be doing exactly what it did in 2010. So Axis Intelligence Research built a single trackable reading for how much of ACH activity has shifted toward its faster, higher-value, business-driven modes.
AMI: definition and formula
AMI — ACH Modernization Index. A composite of four Nacha-published ratios, each indexed to its 2023 value = 100, then weighted:
| Component | Weight | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Same Day ACH share of network volume | 30% | 2.71% | 3.57% | 4.12% |
| Same Day ACH share of network value | 25% | 3.00% | 3.71% | 4.22% |
| B2B share of network volume | 25% | 20.95% | 21.73% | 22.96% |
| Average value per ACH payment | 20% | $2,543 | $2,565 | $2,643 |
| AMI reading | 100.0 | 116.6 | 129.0 |
Sources: all four component inputs are Nacha full-year figures (2023 release February 14, 2024; 2024 release January 30, 2025; 2025 release January 28, 2026). Ratios and index computed by Axis Intelligence Research.
Formula: AMI(y) = 0.30 × (SDA_vol_share_y ÷ SDA_vol_share_2023 × 100) + 0.25 × (SDA_val_share_y ÷ SDA_val_share_2023 × 100) + 0.25 × (B2B_vol_share_y ÷ B2B_vol_share_2023 × 100) + 0.20 × (avg_value_y ÷ avg_value_2023 × 100).
Baseline: 2023 = 100. This is the third computed reading, not a re-based history — no readings before 2023 exist, and none are implied.
Weights, and why: Same Day carries the heaviest weight because it is the only component that reflects a genuine capability shift rather than a mix shift; it is split 30/25 between volume and value because the value side is more easily moved by a handful of large payments. B2B share at 25% captures check displacement, the network’s largest structural driver. Average value per payment at 20% is the weakest signal of the four — it drifts with inflation as well as with mix — so it is deliberately the smallest weight.
Scope: AMI describes composition, not size. A network that shrank by half while keeping the same mix would post an unchanged reading. Read it beside the volume table, not instead of it.
The 2025 reading of 129.0 means the ACH Network’s modernization mix advanced 29% in two years. Decomposed, nearly all of it is Same Day: the Same Day volume-share component reads 152.1 against baseline, while average value per payment reads 103.9. The rail is not becoming more expensive per transaction. It is becoming faster.
Cite this metric as: Axis Intelligence Research, Axis ACH Modernization Index, 2025 reading, published August 22, 2026. CC BY 4.0.
How Fast Is Same Day ACH Growing?
Same Day ACH handled 1.45 billion payments worth $3.92 trillion in 2025, up 16.7% in volume and 21.4% in value. It averaged 5.8 million payments per day across the year and 7.8 million per day in December 2025, when it set a monthly record of 172.1 million payments.
2026 is running considerably hotter. First-half Same Day volume reached 838.7 million payments worth nearly $2.4 trillion, up 26.6% and 27%. Second-quarter volume alone rose 29.5%.
Same Day ACH Share of the ACH Network
| Period | Same Day payments | Share of network volume | Share of network value | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 853.4 million | 2.71% | 3.00% | Nacha, Axis calculated |
| 2024 | 1.20 billion | 3.57% | 3.71% | Nacha, Axis calculated |
| 2025 | 1.45 billion | 4.12% | 4.22% | Nacha, Axis calculated |
| H1 2026 | 838.7 million | 4.61% | 4.80% | Nacha, Axis calculated |
Shares calculated by Axis Intelligence Research from Nacha volume and value figures, retrieved August 22, 2026.
According to Axis Intelligence Research, Same Day ACH crossed 4% of network volume for the first time in full-year 2025 and reached 4.61% in the first half of 2026. Ten years after launch, the fast option still carries fewer than five payments in a hundred — which is either a disappointment or a very large runway, depending on what you are selling.
The Same Day B2B slice is worth separating out: 415.05 million payments worth $2.31 trillion in 2025, with volume up 5.7% but value up 23.5%. Businesses are not sending many more same-day payments. They are sending much larger ones.
Sarah Davis: Same-day pricing is the part nobody prints. Originators pay a per-item Same Day surcharge on top of standard ACH economics, which is why the volume share climbs slowly while the value share climbs faster — treasury teams reserve the fast lane for payments where the float saved beats the fee. Watch what that calculus does after September 2027, when a $10 million payment becomes eligible.
ACH Payment Statistics by Segment
Segment data is where ACH statistics get genuinely useful, and where most published summaries stop at “B2B is growing.”
2025 ACH Network Volume by Segment
| Segment | Payments | Value | Volume change | Value change | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Consumer bill payments and other debits | 17.16 billion | $12.04 trillion | +4.8% | +9.9% | Nacha |
| Internet-initiated (WEB) | 11.41 billion | $6.98 trillion | +6.1% | +11.7% | Nacha |
| Direct Deposit | 8.74 billion | $16.49 trillion | +1.7% | +8.9% | Nacha |
| Business-to-business | 8.08 billion | $63.11 trillion | +9.9% | +8.4% | Nacha |
| Healthcare claim payments | 547.66 million | $2.94 trillion | +7.3% | +10.9% | Nacha |
| Person-to-person | 469.66 million | $775.72 billion | +19.8% | +21.0% | Nacha |
| Same Day B2B | 415.05 million | $2.31 trillion | +5.7% | +23.5% | Nacha |
| International (IAT) | 120.85 million | $374.03 billion | −0.1% | +38.0% | Nacha |
Source: Nacha ACH Network Volume and Value Statistics, retrieved August 22, 2026. Segment categories overlap; they do not sum to network totals.
Three things in that table deserve more attention than they usually get.
B2B is 22.96% of payments and 67.9% of the money. Axis Intelligence Research calculates that business-to-business flows accounted for $63.11 trillion of the network’s $93.00 trillion in 2025. Every analysis that treats ACH as a consumer direct-deposit rail is describing a quarter of the payments and a third of the dollars. Our B2B Payments Statistics page covers the vendor-payment side in depth.
International ACH volume went flat while its value jumped 38%. IAT payment count fell 0.1% in 2025 while dollars moved up more than a third. Cross-border flows are consolidating into fewer, larger transfers — see Cross-Border Payments Statistics.
P2P on ACH grew 19.8%, the fastest volume growth of any segment, to 469.66 million payments. That is the plumbing under bank-owned transfer apps, and it competes directly with the wallet economics covered in Digital Wallet Statistics.
What Is the Average ACH Payment Worth?
The average ACH Network payment was worth $2,643 in 2025 ($93.00 trillion ÷ 35.19 billion payments, calculated by Axis Intelligence Research). Same Day ACH payments averaged $2,862 across the first half of 2026 — slightly above the network average, which is not what most people assume about an urgency-priced product.
The deeper series comes from the Federal Reserve rather than Nacha. The Fed publishes quarterly FedACH commercial statistics going back to 1989, and the average value per transaction line in that file is one of the most underused datasets in US payments.
FedACH Commercial Transactions, Selected Quarters
| Quarter | Volume (millions of items) | Value ($ billions) | Average value per transaction |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1989:Q1 | 171 | 897 | $5,244 |
| 2016:Q2 | 3,223 | 5,415 | $1,680 |
| 2020:Q2 | 4,022 | 7,438 | $1,849 |
| 2024:Q2 | 4,972 | 10,525 | $2,117 |
| 2025:Q2 | 5,371 | 11,619 | $2,163 |
| 2026:Q2 | 5,577 | 12,814 | $2,298 |
Source: Federal Reserve, Commercial Automated Clearinghouse Transactions Processed by the Federal Reserve, retrieved August 22, 2026.
According to Axis Intelligence Research, the average FedACH commercial transaction is worth 56.2% less in nominal dollars today than it was in the first quarter of 1989 — $2,298 against $5,244. ACH began life as a bulk settlement system for a small number of large recurring items. It became a retail rail. The average ticket bottomed around 2016 and has been climbing since, which is the higher-value B2B migration showing up in the operator data before it shows up in anyone’s commentary.
One calculation we will not publish. FedACH processed 21.59 billion commercial items in 2025 against Nacha’s 35.19 billion network total, which invites a “Fed handles 61% of ACH” headline. That division is invalid: the Fed’s commercial file excludes government ACH, which Nacha’s network total includes, and the Fed publishes government items in a separate series that currently runs only through Q3 2025. Two files, two scopes, one meaningless quotient. Operator market share is not derivable from these sources, and anyone publishing it has not read the footnotes.
What Happens When the Same Day ACH Limit Hits $10 Million?
Nacha members approved raising the Same Day ACH per-payment limit from $1 million to $10 million, effective September 17, 2027. It is the third increase in the product’s history: $25,000 at launch, $100,000 in 2020, $1 million in March 2022.
The stated targets are invoice and tax payments, insurance claim payments, payroll funding, merchant settlement, and cash concentration. Every one of those is a flow that currently leaves as a wire when it exceeds $1 million.
The move is explicitly a parity play. Per Nacha’s rule documentation, RTP raised its per-payment limit from $1 million to $10 million in June 2025 and FedNow did the same in November 2025. A source discrepancy worth flagging: The Clearing House’s own July 2025 commentary dates the RTP increase to February 2025 rather than June. We have not reconciled the two and are not going to pick one silently — the direction and magnitude are agreed, the month is not.
The prior increases give a rough sense of what a limit change does. Same Day value grew 41.2% in 2023, the first full year after the $1 million cap took effect, against 22.3% volume growth. Limit increases move dollars far more than they move payment counts.
Sarah Davis: A $10 million ceiling does not make ACH a wire. Same Day still settles in windows, not on demand, and it stays reversible in a way wires are not — which is a feature for the payer and a risk to price for the receiver. The interesting number in September 2027 will not be Same Day volume. It will be Fedwire’s.
How Much of Federal Government Payment Volume Runs on ACH?
The US government finished its exit from paper checks in 2025. As of September 30, 2025, most federal payments — Social Security, veterans benefits, tax refunds — must be issued electronically.
In fiscal year 2025 the Bureau of the Fiscal Service disbursed 1.33 billion payments totaling $6.02 trillion at an electronic rate of 96.96%, covering 88.10% of all federal payments. ACH is, in the bureau’s own framing, the primary system agencies use for electronic funds transfer.
Nacha counts 1.43 billion government Direct Deposits within its 8.74 billion Direct Deposit total for 2025. The two figures are close but not comparable line-for-line: Treasury’s count is fiscal-year and includes non-ACH electronic methods, Nacha’s is calendar-year ACH only.
Direct Deposit was the slowest-growing major segment in 2025 at +1.7% volume. That is what a saturated category looks like. With the check mandate now in force, the remaining conversion headroom is small and mostly concentrated in the last few percent of recipients who are hardest to reach.
Methodology
Collection. Every figure was fetched from a primary source during production on August 22, 2026. Network volume, value, and segment data come from Nacha press releases and the Nacha ACH Network Volume and Value Statistics page. Operator-level ACH data comes from the Federal Reserve’s quarterly FedACH commercial file. Instant-rail comparatives come from The Clearing House’s RTP annual statistics page and the Federal Reserve’s FedNow volume and value statistics page. Federal disbursement figures come from the Bureau of the Fiscal Service. No figure in this article was taken from an aggregator, a competitor compilation, or model memory.
Calculations. All shares, ratios, and index readings labeled as Axis Intelligence Research figures were computed in Python from the sourced inputs and are reproducible from the accompanying CSV. Percentage shares use unrounded inputs and are reported to two decimals. The RDR uses payment counts only. The AMI formula, components, weights, and baseline are disclosed in full above.
What was refused. Two calculations were available and rejected. First, any FedACH-versus-Nacha operator share, for the scope mismatch described above. Second, any blended ACH/RTP/FedNow value-per-payment average, because ACH figures include debit-pull transactions and both instant rails are credit-push only.
Scope. Nacha’s 35.19 billion network figure excludes on-us ACH payments; the 42.1 billion total including them is given where relevant. Segment categories published by Nacha overlap and do not sum to network totals. Fed quarterly data is revised; the file is dated at retrieval.
About This Dataset
The companion CSV contains every figure cited above as an individual row, with value, unit, as-of date, source organization, source document, source URL, retrieval date, primary-source flag, Axis-calculated flag, and a method note on each derived row. It covers ACH Network volume and value 2022–2025, quarterly 2026 data, 2025 segment detail, the FedACH commercial series, RTP and FedNow comparatives, and both Axis metrics.
License: CC BY 4.0. Free to use commercially and non-commercially with attribution.
Cite this dataset as: Axis Intelligence Research. ACH Payments Statistics 2026. Axis Intelligence, 2026. https://axis-intelligence.com/ach-payments-statistics/
Citation
APA Axis Intelligence Research. (2026). ACH payments statistics 2026: Network volume, Same Day growth, and what instant rails actually took. Axis Intelligence. https://axis-intelligence.com/ach-payments-statistics/
MLA Axis Intelligence Research. “ACH Payments Statistics 2026: Network Volume, Same Day Growth, and What Instant Rails Actually Took.” Axis Intelligence, 22 Aug. 2026, axis-intelligence.com/ach-payments-statistics/.
Chicago Axis Intelligence Research. “ACH Payments Statistics 2026: Network Volume, Same Day Growth, and What Instant Rails Actually Took.” Axis Intelligence. August 22, 2026. https://axis-intelligence.com/ach-payments-statistics/.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Nacha’s 35.19 billion figure include on-us ACH payments?
No. The 35.19 billion network figure counts payments submitted to an ACH Operator. Nacha separately reported 6.9 billion off-Network payments in 2025 — primarily on-us items where the originating and receiving institution are the same — bringing total 2025 ACH payment volume to 42.1 billion. Use 35.19 billion for network throughput and 42.1 billion for ACH as a payment method.
Why is the Same Day ACH share of value higher than its share of volume?
Because same-day origination carries a per-item surcharge, originators reserve it for payments where faster settlement is worth the fee — which skews toward larger amounts. In 2025 Same Day was 4.12% of network volume and 4.22% of value. The gap widens in the B2B slice, where Same Day B2B volume grew 5.7% in 2025 while its value grew 23.5%.
Is FedNow taking volume from the ACH Network?
Not at scale. FedNow settled 8,413,402 payments in all of 2025 against 35.19 billion on the ACH Network. Axis Intelligence Research’s Rail Displacement Ratio shows ACH’s 2025 volume increase alone was 3.49 times the combined RTP and FedNow output — though that ratio fell from 6.10 in 2024, so displacement is measurable at the margin.
When does the $10 million Same Day ACH limit take effect?
September 17, 2027. Nacha members approved the increase from $1 million in April 2026. It applies to credits and debits, consumer and business payments, and all three settlement windows. IAT entries remain ineligible for Same Day, and separate dollar limits still apply to ARC, BOC, POP, RCK and XCK entries.
What percentage of ACH volume is business-to-business?
B2B payments were 8.08 billion of 35.19 billion network payments in 2025 — 22.96% of volume, calculated by Axis Intelligence Research. On the value side the concentration is far higher: $63.11 trillion of $93.00 trillion, or 67.9% of all dollars moved on the network.
Can you calculate each ACH Operator’s market share from public data?
No, and published attempts at it are unsound. The Federal Reserve’s quarterly file covers commercial FedACH items only and excludes government ACH, which Nacha’s network total includes. The Fed’s government series is published separately and on a different lag. The two denominators do not match, so the quotient has no meaning.
How many ACH payments does the federal government send?
Nacha counted 1.43 billion government Direct Deposits in 2025. Separately, the Bureau of the Fiscal Service disbursed 1.33 billion payments worth $6.02 trillion in fiscal year 2025 at a 96.96% electronic rate. The figures are close but measure different things — different periods, and Treasury’s count includes electronic methods other than ACH.
What is a typical ACH return rate?
Nacha enforces return-rate thresholds under its Operating Rules rather than publishing a network-wide average return rate in its quarterly volume releases. Any single “average ACH return rate” figure circulating without a named Nacha document behind it should be treated as unsourced.
How does the average ACH payment compare to an average instant payment?
For the first half of 2026 the average ACH payment was $2,747. Axis Intelligence Research calculates an average RTP payment of $4,056 and an average FedNow payment of $54,957 for Q2 2026. FedNow’s high average reflects its concentration in a small number of large-value use cases rather than broad retail adoption.
Which ACH segment is growing fastest?
By volume, person-to-person, at +19.8% in 2025 to 469.66 million payments. By value, international ACH, at +38.0% to $374.03 billion — on essentially flat payment count, meaning cross-border ACH flows are consolidating into fewer, larger transfers.