The new UK Cash & Cash Machines 2013 report from the UK Payments Council shows that cash use increased in the UK last year, with consumers and businesses making 20.8 billion cash payments in 2012, compared with 20.6 billion in 2011. This breaks the long term trend of falling cash volumes year-on-year seen over most of the last decade.

The report found that more people are turning to cash exclusively, possibly to help them monitor the amount they are spending on a day-to-day basis. In 2012, 7.2 million adults made all of their day-to-day purchases by cash, an increase of around 700,000 compared with 2011.

The cash machine remains the most popular way for people to access their cash. This, coupled with an industry initiative to increase the number of ATMs in deprived areas, has seen the number of cash machines in the UK rise to an all-time high of 66,134. Out of those 46,069 are free-to-use, and 97.2% of withdrawals were from free-to-use machines. On average, we withdrew £66 per transaction using debit cards.

The figures from the Payments Council comprise of and analyse industry wide statistics and annual market research with a nationally-representative group of consumers. Therefore our statistics may differ from statistics recently published by the British Retail Consortium, who only consider retail spending data provided by its members.