Walk into almost any café in Vienna, and there’s a good chance the person ahead of you pays with cash. Not because they forgot their card, according to Kurier. Not because the machine is broken. Simply because that’s how they prefer it and probably how they always have.
While the rest of Europe has been steadily swiping, tapping, and clicking its way toward a cashless future, Austria hasn’t really gotten the memo. And honestly, neither has Germany.
A new Europe-wide payments study by consultancy BearingPoint, which surveyed over 10,000 people across the continent, confirms what anyone who has visited Vienna already suspects: Austrians love cash. Some 71 percent use it frequently, putting Austria alongside Germany at 73 percent at the very top of Europe’s cash league. At the other end of the spectrum, Sweden manages just 25 percent. The gap couldn’t be wider.
What surprises people most is that this isn’t just an older generation thing. Among Austrians aged 18 to 24, the smartphone generation, the digital natives 57 percent still use cash regularly. More than half of the most digitally connected young people in the country still want something physical in their hands when they pay.
Perhaps it’s about trust. Perhaps it’s about habit. Perhaps, in an uncertain world, there’s simply comfort in holding something real.
That same instinct for security seems to shape how Austrians feel about the future, too. Around 40 percent say they would use a Digital Euro if it existed, the highest rate in all of Europe. But they have clear conditions: it must be free to use, available everywhere, and handled by their own bank rather than a tech giant. Only four percent would hand their transaction data to Apple or Google.
Europe is moving toward digital money, slowly but surely. Austria will probably come along eventually.
It’ll just want to keep a few coins in its pocket, just in case.
