In just the first half of the year, ACH payment volume grew by 5.5% on a daily average basis, reaching roughly 17.25 billion payments. The growth is even more pronounced in terms of dollar value, with the ACH Network processing $45 trillion in the first half of 2025—a 6.8% increase compared to the same period last year.
In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, Michael Herd, Executive Vice President of ACH Network Administration at Nacha, and Brian Riley, Director of Credit and Co-Head of Payments at Javelin Strategy & Research, examined the state of ACH, the payment types that are driving growth, and the future of the pay-by-bank.
Hitting on All Cylinders
According to Nacha, the ACH Network is experiencing substantial momentum and is on track to add two billion payments in 2025.
The persistent growth signals that the ACH Network is poised to maintain its upward trajectory.
“When I look at the metrics and consider ACH, quite often you’re just looking for general growth,” Riley said. “I look at the total volume of payments and that was solidly up, and the dollar value was significantly up. When you compare that to debit volumes in the U.S.—which only grew by 1%—it’s really significant. I see everything hitting on all cylinders.”
Continuing Long-Standing Trends
This shift is especially notable because it’s spread across multiple payment types.
First, there are Same Day ACH payments—transactions that clear and settle on the same day they’re initiated. Volume rose by 15% year-over-year in Q2, putting this format on track to reach 1.3 billion same-day payments this year.
“The second area I wanted to call out are business-to-business payments,” Herd said. “B2B volume on the ACH Network increased by over 10%, and this is a long-standing trend in ACH. While there are still pockets of check payments that are in use in the B2B space, I think it’s also clear by now that ACH is the predominant payment method in B2B. They tend to be much larger dollar payments and so that boosts the dollar volume that is moving through the ACH.”
The third area seeing increased activity is consumer payments, which were up nearly 6% year-over-year.
Together, these three segments have significantly expanded overall ACH volume and reinforced its role in the broader payments landscape.
“It’s something that’s really been built into the economy,” Riley said. “When I think of myself as a consumer working professionally since 1980, I don’t think I’ve seen a physical paycheck since then. One way or another, I’m probably doing seven or eight in or out transactions on ACH just personally in a month, so I can imagine how those numbers stand out.”
Growth Across the Board
Within each of these segments, new use cases for ACH are continually emerging.
For example, in the B2B payments space, ACH is gaining traction in healthcare claim payments—transactions made by health insurance payers to medical providers like hospitals, doctors, and dental practices. This area has seen a year-over-year increase of 10% in ACH usage.
“I think there’s a pretty clear use case and benefits there for medical providers to get paid electronically, instead of waiting for a check to arrive in the mail,” Herd said. “I think that’s a clear benefit where even a standard ACH is a much faster payment than that check that will follow at some future date. We’re seeing strong growth there in that B2B vertical.”
On the consumer side, the growing popularity of subscription-based services has led to broader adoption of ACH for recurring payments, including bill payments and donations.
Consumers also frequently rely on ACH for account transfers, both one-time and recurring. The rise of online bank accounts, digital wallets, and other fintech solutions has further fueled the use of ACH for these types of transfers.
Collectively, these segments and use cases also present strong opportunities for the continued growth and adoption of Same Day ACH.
“We’re still seeing good growth in Same Day ACH across all the major ACH use cases,” Herd said. “That includes Direct Deposit of payroll and other consumer disbursements. It also includes consumer payments to businesses and other kinds of account transfers, and B2B payments.”
A Unique Factor
Amid this adoption, a significant development will impact the ACH Network this year: an executive order signed in March instructing the U.S. Treasury to eliminate paper check disbursements. With limited exceptions, the order directs a full transition to electronic payments for federal disbursements by Sept. 30, 2025, to the extent permitted by law.
“It’s been a long time coming,” Herd said. “We should see additional migration of some volume of federal government check payments to ACH. Financial institutions should be assisting existing account holders that still receive federal government checks with options on how to enroll to receive those payments by Direct Deposit.”
“One other lesson is that with no checks, there can be no check fraud,” he said. “That’s been a driving reason for the federal government to pursue this policy—paper checks have become probably the single largest source of fraud committed within the space of federal government payments.”
Another major factor influencing the ACH Network is the growing adoption of pay-by-bank and open banking technologies. In this emerging model, consumers no longer need to manually enter their routing and account numbers for each transaction. Instead, they simply authorize a business or organization to securely access their banking information directly from their financial institution.
“That should make enrollment for ACH easier and more seamless to the consumer, particularly in an all-digital or a mobile-first environment,” Herd said. “Many younger generations of consumers who’ve never had a checkbook don’t know what those routing and account numbers are.”
“This is a method that should overcome that barrier to being able to enroll to use ACH payments, so we’re going to see that continue to expand,” he said. “Nacha currently has a work group that is looking at potential benefits and risks of using pay-by-bank in the marketplace.”
Decades in the Making
The transition from paper checks to digital payments has long been a topic of discussion in payments circles, with the shift unfolding over several decades. However, there are signs that this momentum is now accelerating.
“In the federal government space, it’s been official policy to mandate the use of electronic payments since 1999,” Herd said. “In fact, one of my first assignments when I joined Nacha was to participate in the in the campaign around EFT ‘99 use. Without getting into all the dirty laundry, it’s taken a long time to get to the point where just about 99% plus of federal benefit payments are made using Direct Deposit or Direct Express card.”
“There’s that last mile to go to get as close to 100% as possible, so it’s exciting to think that may actually happen,” he said.
