EU cash hoarding surges amid war, wildfire and cyber-attack fears

Something unexpected is happening across Europe. Despite the relentless march toward digital payments—the tap of a phone, the swipe of a card—the actual amount of physical cash in circulation is growing. A lot. The value of banknotes circulating through the European Union has climbed from roughly one trillion euros in 2016 to 1.6 trillion euros as of June 2026. More than 31 billion individual notes are now in people's wallets, pockets, and drawers, compared to 24 billion just before the pandemic. The fifty-euro note has become the favorite, followed closely by the hundred.

Philip Lane, the chief economist of the European Central Bank, laid out this paradox at a conference in Ireland this summer. Cash, he explained, is being used less for everyday transactions—that part is true, the digital shift is real—but the total stock of banknotes keeps climbing. People are holding onto cash rather than spending it. They are keeping it as insurance.

The insurance policy has a name: emergency preparedness. Last year, EU governments began advising their citizens to stockpile essentials—water, canned food, a battery-powered radio—and to keep between seventy and one hundred euros in cash on hand. The recommendation was framed around a seventy-two-hour window: the time needed to survive if systems failed. Austria, Finland, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands all issued similar guidance. The threats were concrete and varied: the catastrophic wildfires that tore through France and Spain this summer, floods, storms, and the possibility of cyber-attacks that could knock payment systems offline.

That last threat is not theoretical. In 2025, Marks & Spencer in the UK was hit by a sustained cyber-attack that crippled its online ordering for weeks. If it could happen to a major retailer, the logic went, it could happen anywhere. Payment networks are fragile. Digital systems can fail. When they do, cash becomes the only currency that works.

Olive McCarthy, a professor at University College Cork who studies financial inclusion, sees both wisdom and danger in this trend. The advice to keep cash for emergencies is sound, she argues—it reminds people to prepare for the moment when digital systems fail them. But there is a risk in treating cash as merely a backup, a relic to be abandoned until crisis strikes. "If we stop using it when there isn't a crisis, it might not be easy to use it when there is," she said. The infrastructure erodes. Shopkeepers stop accepting it. ATM networks shrink. The skill of handling physical money fades.

Yet cash serves purposes beyond emergency survival. It offers privacy in an age of surveillance. It is available to people who have no access to banking—the elderly, the digitally excluded, and those in vulnerable situations. McCarthy pointed to domestic abuse victims who may depend on cash if a controlling partner monitors their bank accounts. Cash is also a tool for teaching children about money, about the tangible reality of spending and saving.

The European Central Bank now describes cash as a critical component of national crisis preparedness. Lane emphasized the need for legislation to protect ATM networks, to ensure that every high street across the EU maintains access to physical money. The paradox—fewer transactions, more stock—is not a sign of cash's irrelevance. It is a sign that Europeans have learned something from recent years: that resilience requires redundancy, that systems fail, and that sometimes the oldest technology is the most reliable.