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Bill splitting statistics: 24 sourced numbers

September 22, 2026 · 9 min read · Dimesum Engineering · reviewed by Jagadeep Sai

Every number here carries a named publisher, a link and a year. We checked each link, dropped the figures nobody could trace, and corrected one that was misdated by two years.

Somebody always pays first. Then the group scatters, and in the United States 60% of people aged 18 to 25 who use payment apps split bills at least weekly (Nasdaq, 2022). That figure is older than three years now, but the habit it describes hasn't gone anywhere. Below are 24 sourced numbers on bill splitting statistics, each named, linked, and dated, so you can see where split payments actually stand.

The headline numbers

In a 2022 survey, 47% of people in the United States who use payment apps split everyday purchases like restaurant meals and groceries (Nasdaq, 2022). That survey is older than three years, but it remains the clearest snapshot of how ordinary the habit became. The same research found 58% of people in the United States aged 26 to 41 who use payment apps split bills at least weekly (Nasdaq, 2022), close behind the younger cohort.

The pattern isn't only American. In a 2024 survey in Australia, 54% of adults were more likely to split bills to save money, rising to 72% among 18 to 29 year olds (NAB research reported by Yahoo Finance Australia, 2024). In the United Kingdom, 63% of diners said splitting the bill is an integral part of dining out (Express, 2021), a 2021 figure that already treated the shared bill as the norm.

Splitting isn't a niche behaviour. It's how groups of friends handle money, and it's where expense tracking earns its keep.

How people split today

The method matters, because it shapes who ends up chasing whom. One person often fronts the bill and waits to be reimbursed, and that "one person fronts it" habit is the crux of most shared expenses. It's exactly what our guide to how to settle up group expenses is built around.

Cash still exists, but it's shrinking. In the United States in 2024, cash was 14% of consumer payments by number. Credit cards were 35%.

Debit cards were 30% (Federal Reserve Financial Services, 2025). U.S. consumers made an average of seven cash payments per month, unchanged since 2020 (Federal Reserve Financial Services, 2024 data). In the euro area, cash was 52% of point of sale payments in 2024, down from 59% in 2022 and 79% in 2016 (European Central Bank, 2024). Those last two figures are older than three years.

How U.S. payments broke down by number, 2024

Moving the money is one thing. Knowing who owes what is another, and that's the split payments problem a shared expenses app tries to solve. If you live with people, our walkthrough on how to split rent with roommates covers the same ground for recurring bills.

Where splitting goes wrong

Nobody photographs this part. In a 2024 survey, 31% of Americans say a friend or family member owes them money (LendingTree, 2024). 60% of people who asked to be repaid still had not received the money (LendingTree, 2024). And 32% of Americans who lent to a friend never got it back (LendingTree, 2024).

Australians feel it too: 24% said a friend had failed or forgotten to pay them back in the past 12 months (Finder, 2023). The person who always fronts the tab isn't imaginary. In a sample of 178,000 groups, Banana Split reported in its own 2023 app data blog that 58% had a single person carrying more than half the spending, and that person fronted a median 55% of total group costs (Banana Split, 2023).

The younger picture is sharper still. In a 2026 survey, 76% of U.S. Gen Z who fronted money for a group expense said they were not fully repaid (Zelle, 2026). 47% of U.S.

Gen Z have gone into debt to cover group expenses (Zelle, 2026). The debts add up: 46% of U.S. Gen Z who owe friends or family money say they owe more than $1,000, and 30% owe $2,500 or more (Fortune, 2026).

Rounding, forgotten rounds, a bill divided by memory rather than by receipt. That's how balances quietly slip away. Splitting a restaurant bill fairly is less about maths and more about a record everyone trusts.

Travel and currencies

Take the group abroad and the friction gains a currency line. Many cards issued in the United States charge 1% to 3% on a purchase made in another currency (Bankrate, 2024). Dynamic currency conversion commonly adds 3% to 7% and can stack on top of the card's own charge for spending in another currency (My Trip Money, 2024). At the extreme, airport currency kiosks reported markups of about 8% to 15% over mid market rates, while ATMs abroad were often closer to 1% to 3% (Bankrate, 2024).

Those percentages ride on real totals. International student group travel commonly costs about $2,200 to $3,200 per student for an 8 to 9 day trip (Princeton University Travel, 2024). Spending clusters, too: Banana Split found in its own 2023 app data blog that 32.7% of a group's yearly spending fell in July and August combined (Banana Split, 2023).

When one person pays in euros and everyone owes in pounds or dollars, the conversion is where the numbers stop matching. We wrote about the multi currency money bugs this creates, because a fair split has to survive a fluctuating rate.

What apps change

Here's the honest bit. It's tempting to say an app fixes all of this, but the causal evidence is thin. There's little independent, peer reviewed research that isolates a bill splitting app's effect on how much people actually recover.

The repayment figures we cited, like the 76% of U.S. Gen Z not fully repaid (Zelle, 2026), describe the problem. They don't describe the cure.

What a shared expenses app can plausibly change is the record. When every share is derived from the bill itself and the ledger can't be quietly overwritten, there's less to forget and less to argue about. That's the thinking behind our append only ledger for split expenses and why we hold that an edit must restate its split rather than erase it. Whether that improves recovery rates is a claim we won't make until someone measures it properly.

What we do not know yet

There are gaps, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Most of the country level figures here come from the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the euro area. Large parts of the world are missing from the surveys.

Several of the strongest numbers are self reported, which means people are telling researchers what they remember, not what a receipt says. Almost none of it separates cause from correlation.

We also want to be clear about our own position. We have no usage data of our own yet, so this post cites nobody's ledger, including ours. Our own numbers will follow only when there are enough groups to aggregate without identifying anybody. Until then, we'd rather point you at named publishers than at ourselves.

If you want to see how the splitting works in practice, our guides on how to split rent and how to split the bill walk through it, and the rest of the writing lives on the blog. When you're ready to keep the score on a trip, a flat, or a Tuesday dinner, start tracking and settling your shared expenses with Dimesum.