Mailed Checks Are Your Most Expensive Payment. Here's How to Change That.

Did you know that the checks arriving in your mail are among the most expensive payments you process? Most firms don't think of them that way. A card payment comes with a processing fee printed on a monthly statement, so it gets argued over in every budget meeting. A check shows up in an envelope with no fee attached, so it feels free.

It isn't. Follow one check through a typical collections office and count the hands. Someone opens the mail and pulls the check out. Someone works out whose account it belongs to, which takes ten seconds when the payer wrote a file number on the memo line and ten minutes when they didn't. Someone keys the amount into the collection software. Someone endorses it, fills out a deposit slip, and either drives a bundle to the bank or feeds it through a scanner at the end of the day. Someone reconciles the deposit against what was posted. And if the check bounces two weeks later, someone unwinds every one of those steps.

That's five or six touches for a payment that might be $75. Multiply it by the volume that comes through your mail room each week and paper becomes one of the quietest, most expensive line items in the operation.

What a mailed check actually costs

The most cited public benchmark comes from the Association for Financial Professionals, which surveys treasury and finance teams on the cost of handling each payment type. In its 2022 Payments Cost Benchmarking Survey, the median cost to receive a paper check was between $1.01 and $2.00. The median cost of an ACH payment was 26 to 50 cents. Issuing a check cost more still, $2.01 to $4.00.

Those are medians across all kinds of businesses, and they mostly describe the clean path: a check arrives, gets matched, and clears. Collections and receivables work rarely stays on the clean path. The real cost of a check in this industry includes the parts a cross-industry average smooths away:

• Exceptions. A check with no file number, a payer name that doesn't match the debtor, or an amount that fits no open plan goes into a pile someone has to research.
• Float. The U.S. Postal Service's standard for First-Class Mail is one to five days, and a check still has to be deposited and cleared after it lands. Every one of those days, the client hasn't been paid and the consumer's balance is wrong.
• Returns. A check that comes back unpaid has to be reversed, the account reopened, the client's remittance corrected, and the consumer contacted again.
• Storage and retrieval. Paper has to be kept, and when a consumer disputes a payment, someone has to find the original or its image.
• Trust accounting. A law firm depositing client money has to land it in the right trust account and document it, which adds a review step to every deposit.

None of that arrives as a fee. It arrives as staff time, late client remittances, and balances that are wrong for a week. That's exactly why it's so easy to underestimate.

Checks are declining, just not in your mail room

Nationally, the direction is clear. The Federal Reserve's 2025 Payments Study, released in July 2026, found that check payments kept falling in both number and value through 2024, while total noncash payments grew to 236.6 billion. In March 2025, an executive order directed the Treasury to stop issuing paper checks for most federal payments as of September 30, 2025, citing the cost, delays, and fraud risk that come with paper.

A national decline doesn't empty your mailbox, though. AFP's 2026 Payments Fraud and Control Survey found that 72 percent of organizations that use checks plan to keep using them for the foreseeable future. In the receivables world, checks keep coming from the same places they always have:

• Employers and payroll companies remitting wage garnishments, often one check covering several employees
• Consumers who would rather mail a check than type a card number into a website
• Homeowners paying association dues and special assessments every month or quarter
• Utility customers, many of them older, who have paid by mail for decades
• Insurers, settlement administrators, and other third parties paying on someone's behalf

You can and should keep nudging payers toward electronic options. For most collection law firms, agencies, utilities, and associations, though, paper will be part of the mix for years. The useful question is how much it costs you while it's there.

The fraud problem got bigger

Checks have also become the favorite target of payment fraud. In February 2023, FinCEN, the Treasury bureau that tracks financial crime, issued an alert with the U.S. Postal Inspection Service about a nationwide surge in check fraud tied to mail theft. Banks filed more than 680,000 suspicious activity reports for potential check fraud in 2022, nearly double the roughly 350,000 filed in 2021.

AFP's fraud surveys tell the same story from the business side. In the 2025 survey, 63 percent of organizations said checks had been the target of attempted or actual fraud, more than any other payment type. In the 2026 survey the figure was 58 percent, still at the top of the list.

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