FedNow Settled 83% More Payments Last Quarter. The Money Moving Through It Barely Grew.

The Federal Reserve's instant payments service settled 4,997,811 customer credit transfers in the second quarter of 2026, worth $274,663,803,964. Both figures come from Federal Reserve Financial Services' published volume and value statistics. The interesting part is the relationship between them. Volume rose 83.2% from the first quarter's 2,728,510 payments. Value rose about 1.3%, from $271,252,920,121. Nearly twice as many payments moved almost exactly the same amount of money.

The Average Payment Halved

• Q1 2026: 2,728,510 payments worth $271,252,920,121 — an average of about $99,400 a payment.
• Q2 2026: 4,997,811 payments worth $274,663,803,964 — an average of $54,957 a payment.
• Q2 2026 daily averages: 54,921 payments and $3,018,283,560 a day. Federal Reserve Financial Services uses calendar days, not business days, for these averages.
• The figures count settled customer credit transfers only.

The average-value figures are arithmetic on the published totals. A falling average payment size on a new rail is usually a sign of the use case broadening. A network that moves a small number of very large payments is doing treasury and settlement work. A network whose average payment is falling toward five figures is starting to carry payroll, account funding, bill payment and disbursements — transactions that happen many times a day rather than a few times a week.

Who Is Connected

More than 1,800 financial institutions were live on the service as of mid-July 2026, three years after launch. Federal Reserve Financial Services has said that group includes seven of the ten largest US banks and reaches more than half of all US checking and savings accounts. Reach is not the same as throughput: an institution can be enabled to receive instant payments without offering customers the ability to send them, and receive-only participation has been the common starting point.

What Is Being Added

• API access to the FedACH payee name verification tool, aimed at reducing misdirected and fraudulent payments before they are sent.
• Enhanced ISO 20022 message formats intended to support cross-border payment capability.
• A Request for Payment pilot, which would let a payee ask a payer to send funds — the mechanism behind bill presentment and request-to-pay.
• Federal Reserve Financial Services will co-chair a newly established X9 Fraud Forum with The Clearing House.

Nick Stanescu, the Federal Reserve's Chief FedNow Executive, has urged participating institutions to implement one or two high-impact use cases — account funding, bill pay or payroll — rather than wait for complete coverage. That advice is consistent with what the volume data shows: growth is coming from a widening set of ordinary, repeated transactions.

Why the Shape of the Growth Matters

An instant rail that carries large-value payments substitutes for wire transfers. One that carries small, frequent payments substitutes for ACH, which is far larger in volume and settles in batches over hours or days rather than seconds. The second is the bigger prize and the harder one to win, because it requires the sending institution to build the customer-facing product, price it, and carry the fraud risk of a payment that is final on arrival. A quarter in which volume nearly doubled while value stood still is the first clear statistical evidence of movement in that direction.