The UK's Faster Payment System (FPS) moved 5.547 billion payments in 2025, up 8.9% year on year, and cleared £1.27 trillion in the final quarter alone. Volume has risen every year since 2017. Faster Payments has become the default way to move money instantly between UK bank accounts, and its growth is shifting from simply replacing cash to powering business payments, Open Banking and platform pay-outs.
The annual scale of the system, plus the latest quarter's value, volume and growth rate.
Faster Payments grew from 1.7 billion transactions in 2017 to 5.5 billion in 2025. The trajectory is unusually clean: every year is higher than the last, through the pandemic and the cost-of-living squeeze alike.
Billions of payments per calendar year. Faster Payments added roughly half a billion transactions in 2025 alone.
| Year | Volume (bn) | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 1.66 | – |
| 2018 | 2.04 | ▲ +23% |
| 2019 | 2.44 | ▲ +19% |
| 2020 | 2.85 | ▲ +17% |
| 2021 | 3.42 | ▲ +20% |
| 2022 | 3.94 | ▲ +15% |
| 2023 | 4.50 | ▲ +14% |
| 2024 | 5.09 | ▲ +13% |
| 2025 | 5.55 | ▲ +9% |
Growth is slowing in percentage terms but still adds around half a billion payments a year. The new headroom comes less from replacing cash and more from Open Banking, payroll and platform pay-outs, which all settle over Faster Payments. Instant payment is becoming the norm UK businesses expect.
Faster Payments sits behind many everyday bank transfers a business sends or receives: paying a supplier today, refunding a customer, moving money between accounts, topping up payroll, or taking an Open Banking payment from a customer. The money moves in seconds, 24/7, including weekends and bank holidays.
When a business sends a single payment from online banking and the money arrives in seconds, it almost always cleared over Faster Payments. Per-transaction limits are set by each bank (commonly up to £1 million), and the rail carries both one-off payments and standing orders. For firms choosing where to bank, real-time payment reliability and limits are a practical differentiator. Compare providers in our business banking guide, and see how card and account-to-account acceptance fit together in payment processing.
See the full Payments page →The headline numbers are only half the story. What makes them worth tracking is where the growth is coming from, because it is starting to reshape how UK businesses get paid.
Bank transfers are becoming a checkout method. Through Open Banking, customers can now pay a merchant straight from their bank account at checkout (“pay by bank”), and those payments settle over Faster Payments. What used to be a way to pay a friend is turning into a way to pay a business. See how this fits alongside cards in our payment processing guide.
Instant money movement is now expected. Marketplaces, platforms and gig employers pay out to sellers and workers; businesses refund customers and pay suppliers. Increasingly the expectation is that the money arrives in seconds, not in a multi-day batch, which pushes more volume onto Faster Payments.
Account-to-account is starting to compete with cards. Because a Faster Payment carries no card interchange, pay-by-bank can be cheaper for a merchant to accept than a card. It is not a like-for-like swap yet, as cards still lead on buyer protection and one-tap checkout, but for the right transactions the cost gap is real. Weigh the trade-offs against card acceptance in payment processing, and against where you hold funds in business banking.
The UK runs three sterling account-to-account rails. They are not competitors so much as tools for different tasks: speed, bulk, or high value.
| Rail | Speed | Typical use | Annual volume | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Faster Payments | Seconds, 24/7 | Single transfers, standing orders, Open Banking | 5.55bn (2025) | Bank-set limits up to £1m |
| Bacs | 3-day cycle | Direct Debits, salary and supplier runs | ~6bn | Low cost, batch-based |
| CHAPS | Same-day | High-value, time-critical (property, treasury) | under 0.3bn | Settles over 90% of sterling value |
For a business, the practical rule is simple: use Faster Payments for everyday transfers that need to arrive now, Bacs for predictable bulk runs like payroll where cost matters more than speed, and CHAPS only for large, time-critical, irreversible payments such as completing on a property. For the full picture across all UK payment methods, see the UK Payments Statistics hub.
Every figure on this page maps to a named primary source below: Pay.UK, which operates the Faster Payment System, and the Bank of England for CHAPS settlement value.
| Source | Publisher | Period covered | Type | Last checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Annual Summary of Payment Statistics | Pay.UK | Calendar year 2025 | Scheme operator | 2 Jun 2026 |
| Quarterly Statistical Report | Pay.UK | To Q4 2025 | Scheme operator | 2 Jun 2026 |
| CHAPS settlement statistics | Bank of England | Latest annual | Central bank | 2 Jun 2026 |
Pay.UK operates the Faster Payment System and publishes the authoritative volume and value series. We take annual totals from the annual summary and the latest quarter from the quarterly report.
Faster Payments figures exclude Bacs and CHAPS. Where we cite those rails for comparison, we name the separate source and period.
Year-on-year growth compares the same quarter a year apart, avoiding seasonal distortion from comparing adjacent quarters.
Headline figures map to Pay.UK, the scheme operator, with CHAPS comparison value from the Bank of England. Comparative annual volumes for Bacs and CHAPS are the latest published figures and are labelled as approximate where the scheme reports a rounded total. Last full review: 2 Jun 2026.