The two US instant payment rails settled a combined $751 billion in Q1 2026. The Clearing House's RTP network processed 128 million transactions worth $480 billion at a daily average of $5.7 billion. The Federal Reserve's FedNow Service settled 2.73 million payments totaling $271.3 billion at $3.01 billion per day.
The sharpest divergence is in average payment size. FedNow's average transaction of $99,414 was 26 times higher than RTP's approximately $3,750 per payment. This gap suggests FedNow adoption has concentrated in high-value corporate and government disbursement use cases, while RTP's six-year head start has built deeper penetration into consumer and small-business payments. Zelle, which processed 4.2 billion transactions in 2025 and routes settlement through both RTP and ACH, accounts for a significant share of that retail volume.
RTP's volume lead remains wide. Its single-day record of 2.27 million transactions on May 1 exceeded FedNow's Q1 daily average of 30,317 by a factor of 75. FedNow's value trajectory, however, is extraordinary: the $271.3 billion settled in Q1 2026 surpassed its entire 2024 annual total of $38.2 billion by more than seven times. With 1,700 FedNow participants now outnumbering RTP's approximately 1,200 live institutions, the larger enrollment base has not yet translated into proportional transaction volume.