How much cash does the average European carry?

How to get close to this number

Think about what cash is for now. In a card-dominated economy, cash covers small purchases, tips and places that do not take cards — which means people carry enough for a day of incidentals rather than for a major purchase. That puts the figure in the tens of euros.

The split in the explanation is the useful structure: cash is around fifty-nine percent of transactions by number but only forty-two percent by value. People pay cash for small things and card for large ones, so the same payment method dominates one count and loses the other — which is why "is cash dying" has two defensible answers.

That divergence is also why cash volumes fall faster in value than in frequency. Each card payment displaces a large cash payment, and the small ones persist longest, so a payment system can look robust by transaction count while shrinking steadily as a share of what people actually spend.