Why European Governments Are Telling Citizens to Keep Cash at Home
Several European governments are now advising households to keep cash on hand. Austria, Finland, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands have each recommended that families hold between €70 and €100 in banknotes to cover essentials for 72 hours. The guidance is part of a broader preparedness push that gained momentum in 2025, when EU residents were advised to stockpile food, water, and other essentials for the same period The Guardian.
The drivers are multiple and overlapping. War on the continent's eastern flank, wildfires and floods intensified by climate volatility, and cyber-attacks have all contributed. The latter threat is not theoretical: Marks & Spencer in the UK suffered a sustained cyber-attack last year that stopped the retailer taking online orders for weeks, a concrete example of how dependent everyday transactions have become on digital infrastructure that can fail.
The European Central Bank has positioned cash as a central pillar of national crisis preparedness. ECB Executive Board member Philip Lane, presenting at the MacGill Summer School 2026 in Glenties, Co. Donegal, Ireland, referenced the need for legislation to ensure networks of cash machines remain a feature of every high street across the EU. Lane's slides, titled "Outlook for the euro area economy," were published on the ECB's website ECB. The ECB itself describes what it calls a paradox: shrinking use of cash for day-to-day purchases, alongside rising numbers of people keeping banknotes at home or in safe deposits The Guardian.
The scale of outstanding euro banknotes gives that paradox statistical weight. As of June 2025, 30.4 billion euro banknotes were in circulation with a total value of €1.6 trillion, according to an ECB blog post published on August 4, 2025 ECB Blog. The ECB's official banknotes page corroborates the figure, stating that more than 30 billion euro banknotes are in circulation with a total value exceeding €1.5 trillion ECB. Demand is not solely domestic: the ECB's June 2026 report on the international role of the euro found that purchases of euro banknotes from the Middle East nearly doubled over the past year, while sales rose by more than 50% ECB.
That same report recorded global foreign exchange turnover rising 27% compared with the 2022 survey, reaching USD 9.5 trillion per day in April 2025. The euro briefly topped $1.20 in late January 2026, its highest level since 2021, before easing Reuters. In February 2026, the ECB opened a "euro lifeline" to make it easier for foreign central banks to secure funding in euros during times of financial stress Reuters.
Monetary policy has moved in parallel. In mid-June 2026, the ECB raised its benchmark deposit rate to 2.25% from 2%, leaving the door open to further tightening to prevent a surge in fuel prices Reuters. That decision came in the shadow of an oil-price shock: on July 23, 2026, crude went above $98 a barrel after Houthi militants allied to Iran attacked shipping Reuters. On the same day, the ECB announced shortlisted designs for new banknotes, confirming that euro banknotes from the previous series will retain their value and continue to circulate alongside the new series ECB.
Olive McCarthy, a professor at University College Cork with an interest in financial inclusion, said the continued use of cash was vital for society The Guardian. Her framing points to a tension that policymakers have yet to resolve: the same digital-payment infrastructure that central banks and governments have encouraged for efficiency and transparency is the infrastructure most exposed to cyber disruption. Cash, long treated as a legacy medium in decline, is being re-elevated to a tool for resilience.
The broader context here is one of converging risks reshaping a single policy question. War, climate-driven disasters, and cyber vulnerabilities are not new threats individually, but their simultaneity is pushing EU institutions and national governments to treat household-level preparedness as a matter of systemic stability rather than personal prudence. The ECB's advocacy for ATM legislation underscores that cash access depends on physical distribution networks that market forces alone may not preserve as transaction volumes decline.
What is unresolved is whether the recommendations will harden into binding requirements, and whether the ECB's push for legislative protection of ATM networks will be adopted uniformly across member states with very different payments ecosystems. The 72-hour threshold itself reflects a judgment about the likely duration of infrastructure disruption — a window short enough to be practicable for households, but long enough to matter if a cyber-attack or natural disaster cascades through payment rails. Whether that window holds under real-world stress is a question the next crisis will answer.
