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Business, consumer, and government use of the automated clearing house network continues on its growth pace with overall ACH payment volume up 4.2% in the first quarter year-over-year. Same-day ACH, Nacha’s faster-payments offering, experienced a 19.1% jump in payments.
Same-day ACH volume, as revealed Wednesday by Nacha, totaled 326 million in 2025’s first quarter, compared with 273.7 million a year prior, while the value of these first-quarter transactions was $897 billion, up 24.8% from the $719 billion logged in 2024’s first quarter. Just three years ago, same-day ACH value in 2022’s first quarter was $290.3 billion.
Several factors are influencing growth in same-day ACH, which launched in 2016. “First, the use cases for same-day ACH are diverse and growing—everything from urgent bill payments and payroll corrections to insurance claims, tax payments, refunds, and gig-worker payouts,” says Daniel Roth, Nacha senior director of communications. “These are real-world needs where timing matters, and same-day ACH delivers.”
Another factor is that businesses are using same-day ACH for high-value and time-sensitive business-to-business payments, Roth says, “which gives organizations better tools to manage their liquidity and cash flow.”
A third factor is that same-day ACH is part of the existing ACH network, so no new integrations are necessary to use it, Roth says. “It’s widely available and every financial institution can accept same-day ACH payments,” he adds.
Most other ACH segments also showed growth in the first quarter. Healthcare payments—constituting business-to-business insurance reimbursements to medical providers—were up 8.1.% to 125 million; Internet-based ACH transactions increased 6.9% to 2.8 billion; and peer-to-peer payments increased 20.4% to 109 million. Only direct deposit ACH payments decreased, by 0.3% to 2.2 billion. Direct deposit ACH transactions last decreased in the first quarter of 2022, which was likely because of the expiration of pandemic-related payments at that time.
The quarter also marks the first time P2P ACH payments surpassed 100 million in volume, Nacha says. The rising performance of P2P payments results from the fact that the ACH is used primarily when consumers move money from their bank accounts to an app or take money from an app to place in a bank account.
Overall, ACH volume totaled 8.5 billion transactions, with 4.8 billion debits and 3.8 billion credits. The value of these transactions was $22.1 trillion, up 6.6% from $20.7 trillion a year prior.
