The Survey and Diary of Consumer Payment Choice has reported on mobile payments since 2010, when 1 percent of US consumers reported that they had made a contactless mobile payment at least once in the past year. Fast forward 13 years, and mobile pay has won over 70 percent of US consumers.

As of October 2023, 70 percent of US consumers made a mobile payment at least once in the prior 12 months. In addition, 29 percent of payments made by US consumers used a mobile device; five years earlier in 2018, just 8 percent of consumer payments were executed via mobile.

When we think about mobile pay, we often envision a consumer holding a phone over a reader at the in-person point of sale, but just 10 percent of in-person payments used a mobile device in October 2023. It turns out that the killer app for mobile pay is remote shopping; 85 percent of remote purchases were completed via mobile. (Remote purchases [22 percent of all purchases] remain less common than in-person purchases [78 percent].)

That made me pause and think about my own purchasing behavior: Groceries purchased on my phone, check. Mother's Day flowers, check. High chair, check. Book about information design, check. Vitamins, check. Takeout, check. You get the idea. Pretty much everything I buy remotely, I use my phone. I may turn to a laptop for exploring reviews and looking at images, but when it's time to push the buy button, I go back to my phone.

The data, released today, shows that the big change in mobile use for remote shopping happened around 2021. Back in 2020, just 40 percent of remote purchases occurred via mobile phone.

Other signifiers of the importance of our phones for shopping and financial management as of October 2023:

  • 72 percent of consumers adopted online or mobile payment accounts like PayPal, Zelle, Venmo, and Cash App in 2023.
  • 73 percent of consumers used mobile banking.
  • 45 percent of payments to another person were made via a mobile device.
  • 27 percent of bills were paid using a mobile device.

You can download the data about consumer payments in 2023 on our website.

Portrait photo of Claire Greene
By Claire Greene, payments expert in the Retail Payments Risk Forum at the Atlanta Fed