The digital euro: what it would change for your money

On Thursday, negotiators from the European Parliament and the member states meet for the sixth time this year to write the law behind a digital euroDigital euroA proposed digital form of cash issued by the ECB, free for basic use, usable online and offline across the euro area.Read in the glossary →. They have been at it since July. The Irish presidency of the Council wants a political agreement before the end of December, and the European Central Bank says that if the law is adopted this year, it could issue the first digital euros in 2029.¹²³

Three years after the Commission’s proposal, most people still do not know what the project would mean for them. In Germany in 2024, 60% of people had never heard of it.⁴ This piece explains what a digital euro would be, what would change for your money, where the law stands, and what the arguments against it are worth.

Useful plumbing, overstated fearsIn brief

A digital euro would be cash in digital form: a free, ECB-backed way to pay in shops, online and between people, including offline, accepted across the euro area. It would not pay interest, it would not be programmable, and you could only hold a limited amount, with anything above that swept to your bank account. Its main purpose is strategic, giving Europe a payment network that does not depend on American card schemes. For ordinary savers, the worries about surveillance and bank runs are mostly answered by the design, but take-up is uncertain: people say they are curious, and few plan to keep much money in it.

What it would be

A digital euro would be central bank moneyCentral bank moneyMoney that is a direct claim on the central bank, such as banknotes, as opposed to bank deposits, which are claims on a commercial bank.Read in the glossary →, like banknotes, but held in an app or on a card. The money in your bank account is different: it is a claim on your bank, guaranteed up to €100,000 by a deposit scheme. A digital euro would be a claim on the Eurosystem itself.⁵

According to the ECB’s own description, it would work like this:⁵

• Free for basic use. Opening an account, holding money and paying would cost individuals nothing. Merchants would pay a capped fee.
• Online and offline. Online payments would go through a bank or payment provider. Offline payments, phone to phone or at a terminal, would work without a connection, and “only the payer and the payee would know the personal transaction details”.
• A holding limitHolding limitThe maximum amount of digital euros one person could hold, meant to stop large outflows from bank deposits. Not yet set.Read in the glossary →. “Users would only be able to hold a limited amount of digital euro in their account”, to prevent large outflows from bank deposits.
• A link to your bank account. Through what the ECB calls the waterfallWaterfall and reverse waterfallAutomatic transfers between a digital euro account and a linked bank account, so you can pay or receive more than the holding limit.Read in the glossary → and reverse waterfall, any payment you receive above the limit would go straight to your bank account, and any payment above your balance would be topped up from it.
• No interest. “No interest would be paid on digital euro holdings.”
• Not programmable. The digital euro “would never be programmable moneyProgrammable moneyMoney with built-in rules on how, where or when it can be spent. The ECB says the digital euro would never be programmable.Read in the glossary →”, meaning nobody could restrict what it is spent on. It could support conditional payments that you set yourself, such as paying on delivery.
• Alongside cash. It “would complement cash, not replace it”. The same package of laws protects the legal tenderLegal tenderThe status that obliges a creditor to accept a form of money in payment of a debt, subject to exceptions.Read in the glossary → status of banknotes and coins.

The holding limit is the number everyone wants to know, and it does not exist yet. The co-legislators asked the ECB to test limits of up to €3,000 per person, and many websites now report that figure as decided. It is not.⁶

Why the ECB wants it

The ECB’s main argument is about who controls how Europeans pay. International card schemes, in practice Visa and Mastercard, handled about 61% of card payments in the euro area in 2022, and in 13 euro area countries, payments in shops depend entirely on them.⁷ “In 13 euro area countries, in-store payments depend entirely on international card schemes,” the ECB board member in charge of the project, Piero Cipollone, said in February.⁸

13 euro countries pay in shops only through foreign card schemes

Each square is one of the 20 euro area countries covered by the ECB report. Across the euro area, international schemes handled about 61% of card payments.

At the same time, cash, the only public money people can use today, is losing ground. In 2016 it was used for 79% of payments in shops by number; in 2024, 52%. By value, cards overtook cash, at 45% against 39%.⁹¹⁰

Cash is losing the till

Share of point-of-sale payments made in cash in the euro area, by number and by value. 2016 comes from an earlier, not fully comparable study.

The third worry is private digital money. StablecoinsStablecoinA crypto token pegged to a currency, usually the US dollar (Tether’s USDT is the largest). Fast, borderless and dollar-denominated, which is exactly why scam networks settle in it.Read in the glossary → pegged to the dollar make up about 99% of that market, and euro stablecoins were worth about €395 million last year, a rounding error.¹¹ The United States has chosen private stablecoins over a public digital dollar: a law on stablecoins was signed in July 2025, after an executive order in January 2025 forbade federal agencies from promoting any central bank digital currency.¹²¹³

Europe does have a private alternative. Wero, the payment app backed by European banks, counts 58 million users in Belgium, France and Germany and is used by more than 48,000 merchants, but it will only reach shop tills in France and Germany “progressively from 2027 onwards”.¹⁴

Where the law stands

The Commission proposed the law in June 2023.¹⁵ The Council agreed its position in December 2025, and the Parliament’s economic committee followed on 23 June 2026 by 43 votes to 14. Right-wing groups forced a full Parliament vote, which confirmed the mandate on 9 July by 416 votes to 169.¹⁶¹⁷¹⁸

From proposal to pilot

Blue: done. Amber: planned. Hover or tap each point for the detail.

The two sides agree on the essentials: online and offline use, free basic services, no interest, a holding limit, and a cap on what merchants can be charged. The Parliament’s rapporteur, Spanish conservative Fernando Navarrete, had proposed last year to allow the online version only if no European private solution existed; that condition did not survive into the adopted text.¹⁹¹

What remains disputed, after five rounds of trilogueTrilogueInformal negotiations between the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission to agree the final text of an EU law.Read in the glossary → talks, is mostly about control and money:¹²⁰

• Who sets the holding limit. The Parliament wants the Commission to set it, on the ECB’s advice, reviewed every two years. The Council wants member states to fix a ceiling by a reinforced majority, with the ECB setting the exact level beneath it.
• How merchant fees are capped. The Parliament wants merchants to be “no worse off” than with today’s payment methods; the Council prefers caps based on national averages for a transition of up to ten years, then caps based on costs.
• Businesses. The Parliament would almost ban companies from holding digital euros; the Council would leave it to the ECB.
• Offline limits and money laundering checks on small payments.

The Parliament also wants at least 24 months between the decision to issue and the launch.¹⁹ Even with a deal in December, the ECB’s 12-month pilot in the second half of 2027 will involve only staff of the central banks, using 36 selected payment providers.²¹

What it would cost, and who pays

The ECB estimates about €1.3 billion to build the system until the first issue, then about €320 million a year to run it, which it expects to cover from seigniorageSeigniorageThe income a central bank earns from issuing money, which can pay for producing and running it.Read in the glossary →, the income it earns from issuing money, as with banknotes.²

Banks would have to adapt their apps, branches and terminals. A study by PwC for the European banking associations puts their initial cost at about €18 billion over four years. The ECB’s own estimate is €4 billion to €5.8 billion.²²⁶

What the digital euro would cost to build

Billions of euros. Bars show a range where estimates give one. Banks and the ECB disagree by a factor of three to four.

For shops, the ECB argues the digital euro would be cheaper than cards. Cipollone says small merchants pay “up to four times more for card payments than larger merchants” and that the digital euro would cost them “approximately half of what they are paying today”.⁸ That depends on the fee caps still being negotiated, and on how the interchangeInterchange feeA fee paid by the merchant's bank to the cardholder's bank on each card payment, built into what shops pay to accept cards.Read in the glossary → paid between banks is set.

For you, basic use would be free under both the Parliament and the Council texts. Extra services could be charged.¹⁹¹⁶

The objections, one by one

“It will drain the banks.” The fear is that people would move savings out of banks into risk-free central bank money, reducing what banks can lend, or all at once in a crisis. The holding limit exists for this reason. When the ECB modelled limits up to €3,000 for 2,025 banks, it found that the continuing switch from cash to bank accounts would add about €127 billion of deposits by 2034, more than offsetting what would flow into digital euros, so that “no aggregate bank deposit outflows would be recorded at all”. In an extreme flight-to-safety scenario, a handful of small banks would come under liquidity pressure.²³ The ECB stresses that this is not its view of the right limit.

For an individual saver, the arithmetic is simple. Euro area households hold nearly €10 trillion in cash and bank deposits.²⁴ A limit of a few thousand euros per person is a wallet, not a savings account, and since it would pay nothing, there would be little reason to fill it.

“It will let the state watch what you buy.” Online, the Eurosystem “would not be able to identify users making or receiving payments”, but your bank or payment provider would, for anti-money laundering checks, as it does today with cards and transfers. Offline, only payer and payee would see the details.⁵ Europe’s data protection authorities asked in 2023 for a threshold under which small payments are not traced at all; how far the final law goes on that is part of the talks on offline limits.²⁵¹ In privacy terms, an online digital euro would be roughly like a card payment, and offline would be close to cash.

“It will replace cash.” Both the proposal and the Parliament’s text come with a separate law protecting cash as legal tender, including obligations on member states to monitor access to cash and its acceptance.¹⁶¹⁸

“Nobody wants it.” This is the strongest objection. In the ECB’s own research, 66% of people said they were interested in trying a digital euro, but in its consumer survey only about 45% said they were likely to adopt it. Asked how they would split a hypothetical €10,000 windfall, people put about 5% into digital euros, against 53% into bank deposits and 12% into cash.⁶²⁶ In Germany, 48% would definitely or probably use it; in Austria, 42%.²⁷²⁸

Curious, not committed

Share of people saying they would try or use a digital euro, from four surveys with different questions. The last bar is the share of a hypothetical €10,000 people would hold in it.

Other countries’ experiences are a warning. In the Bahamas, six years after launch, the Sand Dollar is used in under 1% of retail transactions.²⁹ China’s e-CNY has started paying interest on balances held at banks since January, to encourage use.³⁰ Sweden, once the pioneer, has no issuance decision, and the UK is due to decide on a digital pound by the end of this year.³¹³²

What to do now

Nothing, for the moment. There is no digital euro to open, no app to download and no pilot open to the public before 2029 at the earliest. If a website, app or caller offers to sell you digital euros or to “register” you in advance, it is a scam. When the time comes, a few points will matter:

• Check where you get it. It would be distributed by banks and payment providers. You should be able to open it with the bank you already use.
• Keep savings in savings. The digital euro would pay nothing. It would be a way to pay, like cash or a card, not a place to store money.
• Use offline mode for privacy, within whatever limits the law sets, the same way you would use cash.
• Watch the merchant fee. If the caps work as promised, small shops may start steering you toward it, the way some steer you away from cards today.

Money that belongs to nobody’s network

The digital euro is less a revolution for savers than a piece of infrastructure: a public payment network, free to use, that Europe would control. Most of the alarm about it, from emptied banks to state surveillance, is answered by its design on paper, and the remaining fights are about who sets the limits and who pays the fees.

What the design cannot settle is whether anyone will use it. People already have cards, phones and bank apps that work. The digital euro will succeed if it is accepted everywhere, costs shops less, and works when the network or a foreign provider does not. That is a test of execution, and it will not be passed in a trilogue room.

Sources

All links accessed 2 November 2026.

Footnotes

1. Agence Europe, “Digital euro: EU co-legislators examine anti-money laundering, offline payments, usage fees”, October 2026; Ecommerce Europe, “Political and technical progress on the Digital Euro”, 18 September 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

2. ECB, via Central Bank of Ireland, “Eurosystem moving to next phase of digital euro project”, 30 October 2025. ↩ ↩²

3. Irish Presidency of the Council of the EU, Programme, 1 July to 31 December 2026; Freshfields, “Europe’s digital euro heads to last stage of negotiations”, 15 July 2026. ↩

4. Cointelegraph, “Germans split on digital euro, most don’t know what it is”, June 2024 (Bundesbank survey). ↩

5. ECB, FAQs on the digital euro, updated 17 August 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³

6. ECB, Preparation phase of a digital euro: closing report, October 2025. ↩ ↩² ↩³

7. ECB, “Most EU countries rely on international card schemes for card payments, ECB report shows”, 28 February 2025. ↩

8. ECB, Piero Cipollone, “The digital euro: strengthening Europe’s payments ecosystem”, Nicosia, 6 February 2026. ↩ ↩²

9. ECB, Study on the payment attitudes of consumers in the euro area (SPACE) 2024, 19 December 2024. ↩

10. ECB, Study on the payment attitudes of consumers in the euro area (SPACE) 2022, December 2022. ↩

11. ECB, Financial Stability Review, “Stablecoins on the rise: still small in the euro area, but spillover risks loom”, November 2025. ↩

12. The White House, “Fact sheet: President Donald J. Trump signs GENIUS Act into law”, July 2025. ↩

13. The American Presidency Project, Executive Order 14178, “Strengthening American leadership in digital financial technology”, 23 January 2025. ↩

14. European Payments Initiative, “Wero’s Next, Now: e-commerce accelerates as in-store takes its first steps”, September 2026. ↩

15. European Commission, “Single Currency Package: new proposals to support the use of cash and to propose a framework for a digital euro”, 28 June 2023. ↩ ↩²

16. Eunews, “Digital euro: Council agrees position to negotiate with Parliament”, 19 December 2025; Council of the EU, “Single currency: Council agrees position on the digital euro and on strengthening the role of cash”, 19 December 2025. ↩ ↩² ↩³

17. Agence Europe, “Large majority of MEPs on European Parliament’s ECON Committee pave way for digital euro to be issued”, June 2026. ↩

18. Eunews, “Digital euro: Parliament says yes; inter-institutional negotiations to start on 13 July”, 9 July 2026. ↩ ↩²

19. European Parliament, Legislative Train: Digital euro; Agence Europe, “European Parliament’s draft report refocuses digital euro on complementarity with existing cash and solutions”, November 2025. ↩ ↩² ↩³

20. Agence Europe, “Digital euro: fees, legal tender, holding limits and offline payments on menu”, September 2026. ↩

21. ECB, “ECB selects 36 payment service providers to join digital euro pilot”, 14 July 2026. ↩

22. PwC, Digital Euro Cost Study, June 2025; Cyprus Mail, “Digital euro implementation costs estimated at €18 billion”, 20 April 2026. ↩

23. ECB, Technical data on financial stability impact of digital euro, 22 October 2025. ↩

24. ECB Blog, “Why Europeans save differently and how to put those savings to work”, 15 September 2026. ↩

25. European Data Protection Board, “Digital euro: ensuring the highest data protection and privacy standards”, 18 October 2023. ↩

26. ECB Research Bulletin, Georgarakos, Kenny, Laeven and Meyer, “The digital euro: awareness, adoption and household portfolios”, 19 December 2025. ↩

27. Deutsche Bundesbank, Monthly Report, “The digital euro: key elements and outlook”, 24 March 2026. ↩

28. Österreichische Gesellschaft für Europapolitik, “Awareness of the digital euro already high, acceptance still low”, March 2026. ↩

29. The Tribune, “Sand Dollar used in under 1% of retail transactions”, 30 October 2026. ↩

30. ChinaScope, citing Xinhua, “e-CNY to be treated as deposits and pay interest from 2026”, 29 December 2025. ↩

31. Sveriges Riksbank, e-krona; Crowdfund Insider, “Sweden’s Riksbank urges preparations for potential digital krona”, October 2026. ↩

32. PublicTechnology, “Government to announce decision on digital pound in next two months”, 27 October 2026. ↩