FedNow has overtaken The Clearing House’s Real-Time Payments (RTP) network on bank participants, with the Federal Reserve’s instant-payments rail reaching 1,600 financial institutions in early 2026 against RTP’s 1,135 — yet RTP still moved roughly $447 billion more in dollar value across 2025. The split tells a clearer story than the headline numbers: FedNow is winning the institutional plumbing race while RTP is winning the wholesale-payments race, and the gap is unlikely to close evenly.
FedNow processed roughly 8.4 million transactions worth $853.4 billion across 2025, a 459% increase in transaction volume year-on-year and a more than twentyfold increase in dollar value from 2024’s $38.2 billion, per Federal Reserve Financial Services data. The average payment size jumped from $25,376 in 2024 to $101,435 in 2025, reflecting both the November 2025 transaction-cap increase to $10 million and the network’s shift from small-ticket consumer transfers to corporate and federal-disbursement use cases. RTP, in operation since 2017, processed more than $1.3 trillion across 2025 with a smaller financial-institution footprint, having raised its own cap to $10 million in February 2025.
The institutional onboarding race tells the cleaner trend. FedNow added approximately 500 new participants during 2025, with PNC Bank among the most recent additions to the Federal Reserve rail despite being a founding member of The Clearing House. More than 100 institutions joined in Q4 2025 alone. RTP has stabilised at roughly 1,135 participating banks, with growth slowed by the network’s ownership structure: The Clearing House is owned by 22 of the largest US banks, and smaller community banks have historically preferred the central-bank-operated alternative. FedNow now sits at 1,600+ participants versus RTP’s 1,135, an inversion of the situation through 2024 that has materialised in roughly 18 months.
The infrastructure response is visible in named players. JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citi participate on both networks, but several Tier-1 fintech infrastructure providers have been adding FedNow integration first. Modern Treasury, Treasury Prime and Synctera all completed FedNow originating-bank integrations during 2025; Galileo and Marqeta extended their BaaS APIs to support FedNow send/receive flows. The US Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service began routing federal agency disbursements through FedNow during 2025 via its Digital Payout Program, a use case RTP cannot match without becoming a quasi-public utility. The Clearing House’s commercial focus and FedNow’s policy mandate have begun to differentiate the two rails operationally rather than competitively.
“It’s going to be up to us to move instant payments from being novel to being normal.”
— Mark Gould, Chief Payments Executive, Federal Reserve Financial Services (Banking Dive, Money 20/20, October 2024)
For payments infrastructure and BaaS providers, the operational implication is that single-rail offerings have become uncompetitive. A fintech selling embedded-payments APIs to community-bank or credit-union customers now needs both FedNow and RTP origination capability, plus the routing logic that decides which rail to use based on counterparty reachability, cap profile and risk preference. The Tier-1 providers — Modern Treasury, Stripe and Adyen on the payment-processor side; Galileo, Marqeta and Synctera on the BaaS side — all already do this; the smaller layer of regional BaaS providers is the next consolidation target.
For corporate treasury and fintech operators, the cap and reachability changes have materially altered which payments now route over instant rails. The $10 million cap on both FedNow and RTP since February 2025 (RTP) and November 2025 (FedNow) puts a meaningful share of B2B invoice and payroll payments inside the instant-payments perimeter for the first time. The Federal Reserve’s decision to make federal agency disbursements available through FedNow has converted government refunds, tax disbursements and emergency relief payments into same-day flows for participating receiver banks. The contrarian read — that instant payments will saturate at SME and consumer flows because corporate treasurers prefer ACH’s settlement-finality and reconciliation tooling — is being slowly disproven by the participant numbers.
The forward question is whether RTP’s commercial dollar-volume lead can persist as FedNow’s participant count compounds. Two scenarios are plausible. In the first, RTP’s ownership structure continues to limit smaller-bank participation; FedNow continues to add 400–600 new banks per year through 2027 and overtakes RTP in dollar value by the end of 2027 as the larger participant base routes more flows. In the second, RTP’s commercial focus and the bank-owned model produce specialised wholesale flows — corporate-to-corporate, supply-chain finance — that maintain its $1.3 trillion-plus annual run rate while FedNow specialises in consumer and federal flows. Watching the per-network share of B2B versus consumer transactions through the 2026 quarterly statistics will resolve the question. For now, both networks have moved past the proof-of-concept phase and into structural roles in the US payments stack.
Related theindustryspread.com coverage on this transition: the Trump EO ordering Fed master-account review for fintechs, Mercury’s $200m raise as the OCC clears its national bank charter, and Klarna’s Q1 2026 result with deposits funding 91% of book.
Rick Steves
Rick Steves has seen business and economics through many lenses. He joined the financial services industry in 2009, and has been a financial journalist since 2011. He holds a degree in Business Administration and has experience producing real-time news, from both buy-side and sell-side, as well as for retail traders, brokers and service providers. Steves' work has appeared in a variety of online publications including FX Street, NewsBTC, FinanceFeeds, and The Industry Spread. Rick has great interest in the dynamics of the trading industry. The never-ending clash between technology, economics, regulation, and more importantly, the people.
