Post Office Cash Tracker Is NOT The Whole Story!

It is, of course, good that the Post Office has a “Cash Tracker”.

The only problem?

It does not give anything approaching the complete picture of the cash the UK public - us - use as we go about our daily lives.

That is in keeping with all the other data sets about cash produced by UK Finance, LINK Scheme Ltd, the Big Five UK Banks, the Bank of England and Financial Conduct Authority. All of them - at best - give only part of the total picture.

So let’s try to shed more light on how the Post Office is doing with cash at their counters and some comparisons with other cash channels.

In 2025, the total cash deposited at post office counters was between £33 and £35 billion. What % of total UK cash deposits were made at post office counters in 2025?

The figure is not published, like most figures related to cash, unless they help create the illusion favoured by the Big Five UK banks that cash is “dying”.

Turning to cash withdrawals, the total cash withdrawn at those same post office counters was between £10 billion and £12 billion.

Let’s use the higher figure of £12 billion.

The average value of a cash withdrawal at a post office counter is around £140.

So that means that there were roughly 85 million counter cash withdrawals at post office counters in 2025.

To put this into perspective, there were roughly 800 million LINK cash withdrawals made at UK ATMs in 2025 and a further roughly 96 million on-us ( bank customers using their own banks ATMs) cash withdrawals made at ATMs last year.

So total ATM cash withdrawal volume for 2025 - excluding credit card withdrawals- was around 896 million.

Given that the total number of post office counter cash withdrawals was only 85 million, this means that those counters provided less than 10% of the number of withdrawals made at ATMs.

What does that mean?

Put bluntly, that anyone who says that post office counters can replace ATMs as a source of cash for the UK public is either totally bonkers - or an obvious liar.

Which explains why only 4% of the UK public told YouGov in May this year that they support the phasing out of 24/7 ATMs in favour of cash access being solely via post office counters.

Yet that is exactly the direction in which HM Treasury and the Big Five UK banks continue to push - and which meets their definition of “reasonable” cash access.

We don’t know if this will all emerge from the Richard Lloyd chaired Access to Banking Services Review.

BUT emerge it will.

WE guarantee it.