What's the shape of typical card loads?
№ 108 · Card load distribution
Definition
MetricDistribution of individual load or top-up amounts onto the card or account
Unitcount of loads by amount band, plus median and mean load value
Histogram of card top-up amounts. Bimodal: paycheck loads ($1-3K) and small loads ($20-100). Build from transaction event logs filtered to top-ups. Distribution tells you who your customer really is. Example: 42% loads below $100, 28% $100-1000, 18% $1000-3000 (paycheck), 12% $3000+.
Benchmarks
| Bottom 30% | Median | Top 30% |
|---|---|---|
| A single low mode below USD 100 with fewer than one reload per active card per month, indicating top-up-on-demand rather than a funded account | Mean load value in the USD 250 to USD 300 range at roughly 1.8 reloads per active card per month, giving USD 450 to USD 550 of monthly load per active card | A bimodal distribution with a clear payroll-sized mode, and a mean load above USD 300 with more than one reload per active card per month |
US general purpose reloadable prepaid and neobank card programmes. Market size and growth from 2024 to 2025 data, per-load values from a 2014 Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City study of Netspend cardholders, transaction values from Federal Reserve Payments Study 2022 data. · This is the weakest benchmark in the section and should be labelled as such on the page. Only four credible sources publish anything usable, and the only per-load distribution figures available come from a 2014 Kansas City Fed study of a single issuer's cardholders, which is more than a decade old and predates instant transfer, real-time payroll and the current neobank cohort. A 2014 mean of USD 285.53 per load carries no inflation adjustment and no behavioural adjustment. Use the shape of the distribution rather than the level: what matters operationally is whether the histogram is bimodal with a payroll mode, not whether the mean matches a published figure. Market-level context is sounder: USD 255bn of US GPR load value in 2024 growing at 8%, and prepaid transactions growing 11.5% by volume against 2.7% for non-prepaid between 2021 and 2023.
| Category | Bottom 30% | Median | Top 30% |
|---|---|---|---|
| Consumer prepaid card payments (spend side, not load side) | not published | USD 34 average payment value in 2022 | not published |
| Business and commercial prepaid card payments (spend side) | not published | USD 114 average payment value in 2022, business share rising from 1% to 7% of prepaid payments by number since 2015 | not published |
When it looks bad
The histogram has a single tall spike at the smallest load band and a long thin tail, with no payroll-sized second mode, so users are topping up just enough to cover the transaction in front of them rather than treating the account as somewhere money lives.
62% of loads fall between USD 10 and USD 40, the median load is USD 22, and average balance held is USD 31. Interchange per active card is fine but there is no float and no primary-account behaviour anywhere in the distribution.
What to do about it
- Chase the second mode rather than the mean: build the direct deposit or salary-split flow and measure the share of active cards with at least one payroll-sized load per month. Direct deposit users hold cards materially longer than cash reloaders, which is the only durable way to move this distribution (Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City study of Netspend cardholders, 2014, flagged as dated).
- Remove reload friction and cost at the point where the distribution is thinnest. Javelin found that users abandon a reloadable programme when the reload process is inconvenient or the fees are seen as too high, and in-store reload fees of USD 3 to 6 per load are punitive against a median load in the low hundreds (Javelin 2025 GPR Scorecard).
- Segment the histogram by funding method before drawing conclusions, since a card-funded top-up population and a payroll population are two different businesses sharing one chart, with different fraud, different float and different interchange economics.
- Watch the commercial segment separately. Business prepaid payments averaged USD 114 against USD 34 for consumers, and the business share of prepaid payments by number rose from 1% to 7% between 2015 and 2022, so a small commercial cohort can distort a consumer distribution badly (Federal Reserve Payments Study 2022 data).
Sources
- Javelin Strategy and Research The US GPR market represented USD 255bn of total load value in 2024 and continues to grow at an 8% compound rate, with reload convenience and fee levels cited as the main reasons users abandon a programme. javelinstrategy.com ↗
- Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta The average prepaid card payment was USD 34 for consumers and USD 114 for businesses in 2022, with prepaid at 6% of general-purpose card payments and the business share rising from 1% to 7% by number since 2015. atlantafed.org ↗
- Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System Prepaid card transactions grew 11.5% by volume and 7.0% by value annually from 2021 to 2023, faster than non-prepaid at 2.7% and 3.3%, and surpassed card-not-present as the fastest growing category for the first time since 2015. federalreserve.gov ↗
- Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System Prepaid debit card payment estimates including general-purpose, private-label and EBT versions, updated March 2025, covering number and value from 2015 to 2022. federalreserve.gov ↗
- Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City (Hayashi and Cuddy), as relayed by PrepaidCards123 The average GPR prepaid card was reloaded 1.8 times with an average value per load of USD 285.53, with direct-deposit users holding cards materially longer than cash reloaders. prepaidcards123.com ↗
- Research and Markets, via GlobeNewswire US prepaid demand is described as concentrating around direct deposit and availability certainty rather than acceptance, with retail GPR and wallet-linked prepaid accounts as the two dominant structures. globenewswire.com ↗