FedNow at Three: Volume Nearly Doubles as Smaller Payments Drive Growth

Three years after launch, FedNow's quarterly transaction count jumped 83% to nearly five million in Q2 2026 while total settled value barely moved. The drop in average payment size from $99,000 to $55,000 points to a system expanding beyond early large-value adopters into routine commercial payments.

The Federal Reserve's FedNow Service processed 4,997,811 payments in Q2 2026, an 83.2% increase from 2,727,000 in Q1. Total settled value reached $274.7 billion, up just 1.3% from the prior quarter. Average payment size fell from approximately $99,000 to $54,957. The contraction is consistent with broadening adoption across smaller financial institutions and lower-value commercial payments such as payroll and insurance disbursements.

Approximately 1,700 financial institutions were connected to FedNow as of mid-2026. Daily throughput averaged 54,921 payments and $3.0 billion in settled value. Full-year 2025 volume reached 8.4 million transactions, a 459% increase from 2024 but still a fraction of total U.S. interbank payment flows.

The Federal Reserve proposed amending Regulation J in April 2026 to permit FedNow participants to route transactions through intermediaries, enabling cross-border use cases for the first time. Comment letters from Stripe, Visa, Wise, The Clearing House, and the Bank Policy Institute supported the expansion. Stripe urged the Fed to revisit on-behalf-of residency restrictions, arguing that maintaining them would leave the cross-border objectives only partially fulfilled.