Key Cheque Facts and Figures

  • There were 3.1 million cheques were issued each day in 2010, compared with 11 million in 1990, the peak year for cheque volumes.
  • Total cheque volumes have fallen by just under a third in the three years since 2007.
  • Each adult made 1 cheque payment per month in 2010 compared with 2.4 per month in 2000.
  • Each adult received on average fewer than five cheques during the year in 2010.
  • Less than 5% of regular payments were made by cheque in 2010, compared with one in ten as recently as 1998.
  • The average value of a personal cheque was £392.
  • Only 2% of retail spending by value is still paid by cheque, compared with 70% by debit or credit card.
  • Business cheque use peaked in 1997 and has since declined as businesses increasingly move to automated payments.
  • Over the last ten years business cheque volumes have decreased by more than half.
  • It is very rare for a cheque to bounce / be returned unpaid. Only around 0.50% of all cheques are returned unpaid.
  • 94% of attempted cheque fraud was spotted and stopped in the cheque clearing process in 2010.
  • Credit clearing volumes peaked in 1998 when 178 million bank giro credits were cleared. In 2010, 61 million were cleared, two thirds of the volume in 1998.
  • 92% of the items going through the credit clearing are for bill payments.
  • Euro cheque clearing volumes peaked in 2003 when 729,000 euro cheques were cleared. By 2010 this volume and dropped by close to 40% to 279,000.
  • US dollar cheques passing through the currency clearings in 2009 amounted to 48,000, a decline of 17% in 12 months.

Facts re 2010 UK Payments Statistics 2011

  • If all the cheques processed in 2010 were laid end to end, they would stretch almost 2.9 times round the world.  This compares with 9 times around in 2000 and in 1990, the peak year for the number of cheques process, 12 times.
  • The average value of a cheque in 2010 was £981, more than double the figure in 1990 (£482).
  • Of a typical day’s cheque clearing in 2010 more than half were written for £76 or below and 33 had a value in excess of £1 million; £25 was the most common amount, including more than 89,000 Premium Bond prizes.
  • The carbon footprint of an ongoing Direct Debit is jut 0.76g CO2 per payment –a tiny proportion in comparison to cheques, which generate carbon emissions of 49.3g CO2 each time they are used.