In just over two years since its launch, the U.S. Federal Reserve’s FedNow real-time payments system has attracted participation from 1,600 financial institutions.
The service added 500 institutions over the course of last year alone, with more than 100 joining in Q4 2025. Currently, nearly all of the nation’s leading financial services companies now participate in FedNow.
This expanding footprint has driven measurable improvements across nearly every key metric for FedNow. The Federal Reserve reported that average daily transactions on the service reached almost 30,000 last year, while total transaction volume increased 460% year-over-year.
Alongside this volume growth, the total dollar value of FedNow transactions reached $853.4 billion last year, with an average payment size of $101,435—up significantly from $38.2 billion and $25,376, respectively, the prior year.
The Obligatory Comparison
As successful as FedNow has been, nearly every discussion of the network includes comparisons to the Clearing House’s RTP network. That’s because the two are the only players in the closely watched U.S. real-time payments space.
Although it was established in 2017 by a consortium of the largest U.S. banks, the RTP network has already been surpassed by FedNow in one key area: network participation. RTP currently has around 1,135 financial institutions on its network.
However, the RTP network still exceeds FedNow in payments value. The Clearing House recently reported processing more than $1.3 trillion in total payments in 2025. This may be partly due to RTP increasing its transaction cap from $1 million to $10 million last February, while FedNow did not raise its limits until September.
A Testament to Real-Time Payments
While comparisons between RTP and FedNow are inevitable, there is substantial overlap between the two services. For example, PNC Bank—a founding member of the Clearing House—was one of the last holdouts to finally join FedNow.
PNC emphasized, however, that its support for FedNow should not be interpreted as a lack of confidence in the RTP network. Rather, the growing participation in both networks by hundreds of banks and credit unions is a testament to the power of real-time payments and their potential to reshape the U.S. payments landscape.
