Canada uses less cash than any country in the world & it’s not even close

We’ll admit that we always had our suspicions, but it’s nice to see Canada top the rankings of the world’s most cashless countries in a recent list for this year. Not only did we beat out places like Hong Kong, Japan and Norway, but we did so handily! Let’s check out the rankings, shall we?

The rankings come from money.co.uk, which is an online comparison service for financial products. To make the list, they looked at recent data from the World Bank, as well as from major debit and credit card providers. They broke things down into 5 categories in order to give each country a score out of 100. These categories are:

• % of population (aged 15+) with a credit card
• % of population (aged 15+) with a debit card
• Contactless payment limits
• Number of major e-wallet operators available
• Number of ATMs per 100,000 adults

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Unfortunately, there wasn’t a clear breakdown of the data that we could dive into, but these are the countries that made it into the top 10, as well as their scores.

1. Canada- 79.1
2. Hong Kong- 76.8
3. Singapore- 76.2
4. New Zealand- 75
5. Japan- 74.1
6. Australia- 72.3
7. Norway- 72.2
8. United Arab Emirates- 72.1
9. Switzerland- 70.9
10. Finland- 70

Now, how does Canada fit in? Well, we’ve apparently got the highest percentage of credit card users in the world, at 83%. Plus, we’ve also got the highest limit for contactless transactions in the world, at $250 CAD. That’s $30 more than the next highest (Japan), and around double the limit of any European countries.

To be honest, this just reaffirms our own, anecdotal bias. Especially a couple years back when we would still have to sign the bill at a restaurant in the states, like it was a movie out of the 1980s or something.