What might the digital euro mean for businesses?

Short answer

For businesses, the digital euro would mainly be one more way for customers to pay in shops and online. Under the Commission proposal and Parliament's position, most merchants that already take digital payments would have to accept it, with exemptions for the smallest firms, and merchant fees would be capped. It has not been issued, and the law is still in trilogue negotiation.

What does the digital euro mean for businesses, and how would they use it?

For most firms, the digital euro would be one more way for customers to pay, not a new way to run the company's finances. It would be central bank money for everyday payments, distributed by banks and other supervised payment service providers (PSPs). As of 5 November 2026 it does not exist for public use; the Eurosystem aims to be ready for a potential first issuance during 2029 if the regulation is adopted by the end of 2026 (ECB digital euro FAQ). Dates are tracked on our timeline.

The business relevance is therefore mainly on the receiving side of retail payments. The use cases the ECB has described are person-to-person, point-of-sale, e-commerce and payments to and from public authorities (ECB stocktake, October 2023). In practice, businesses would use it in four ways: taking payments in a shop, taking payments at an online or in-app checkout, paying refunds, and receiving pay-outs into their ordinary bank account, each covered below.

If you sell to consumers, the questions that matter are acceptance, cost, settlement into your bank account, refunds and reconciliation. If you mainly invoice other businesses, it is unlikely to change how you get paid.

This page is general information about a proposal that is still changing. It is not legal, tax or regulatory advice, and DIGITAL EUR is an independent publisher with no affiliation to the ECB or the Eurosystem. For the basics of what the instrument is, start with our digital euro overview.

What is confirmed, what is proposed and what is still open?

Much business coverage describes proposals as rules. The table separates them.

For the legislative steps in more detail, see our legislation tracker.

Would my business have to accept the digital euro?

Probably, if you already take card or other digital payments and the final law follows the direction of the current texts. But nothing is binding yet.

The ECB summarises the Commission's proposal as foreseeing mandatory acceptance by any merchant that accepts digital payments (ECB FAQ). The logic is legal tender: the digital euro would be a form of the euro itself, as banknotes are, so a business that takes digital payments could not refuse it in the ordinary course.

Article 9 of the Commission proposal (COM(2023) 369) lists four situations in which a payee could refuse the digital euro:

1. the payee is an enterprise with fewer than 10 employees, or with annual turnover or balance sheet total of no more than €2 million, or a non-profit legal entity, unless it accepts comparable digital means of payment;
2. the refusal is made in good faith on legitimate and temporary grounds beyond the payee's control, such as an outage, with the burden of proof on the payee;
3. the payee is a private individual acting in a purely personal or household capacity;
4. payer and payee agreed on a different means of payment before the payment.

Article 10 adds that a business subject to the obligation could not exclude the digital euro through standard terms that were not individually negotiated. A "we do not accept digital euro" line in pre-printed terms and conditions would not bind the customer.

The two co-legislators have since adopted their own positions. The European Parliament's position, adopted on 9 July 2026 with 416 votes in favour, 169 against and 22 abstentions, would require most businesses to accept the digital euro, with exceptions for the self-employed and for small and micro enterprises that do not accept other digital payments (European Parliament press release). The Council adopted its negotiating mandate on 19 December 2025; its press release does not describe how the mandate treats acceptance exemptions (Council press release). The final wording, including size thresholds and how "accepts digital payments" is defined, will come out of the trilogue.

Sources: Commission proposal Articles 9 and 17, the Council and Parliament press releases and the Legislative Observatory summary. The wider comparison of the three texts is on our legislation tracker.

What about SMEs and the self-employed?

The important word in every version is "unless". A small business is exempt in the Commission text only if it does not already accept comparable digital payments, and Parliament's wording is similar. A café that takes cards would, on either text, probably fall inside the obligation; a market stall that takes only cash would not. Parliament's position widens the exemption from micro-enterprises to small enterprises and the self-employed, which would matter for many SMEs, but only for those that stay out of digital payments altogether. Until the final text defines "comparable" or "other" digital payments, no SME can be certain which side of the line it sits on.

Two practical points follow. An obligation would only apply once the digital euro is issued, not before 2029 at the earliest. And for most merchants the likely route is that their existing acquirer adds digital euro acceptance to the terminal or checkout they already use: the ECB describes a "common acceptance layer" and, for contactless payments, aims to avoid requiring terminal upgrades (ECB preparation phase closing report). Confirm this with your provider when products exist.

What could it cost a merchant to accept the digital euro?

No one can give you a fee in euros or percent today. What can be said is how the proposed fee model works.

According to the ECB, PSPs that distribute the digital euro would be able to charge merchants for their services, as they do for other payment methods, but price setting for merchants and PSPs would be subject to a cap as proposed by the Commission. The Eurosystem says it would not charge scheme or processing fees and would bear the cost of the scheme and infrastructure itself (ECB FAQ).

Article 17 of the Commission proposal caps the merchant service charge and inter-PSP fees at the lower of two benchmarks: relevant costs plus a reasonable profit, or fees for comparable digital means of payment (Commission proposal). The Council's position, as described in its press release, caps interchange and merchant fees during a transitional period of at least five years at a level based on fees for comparable means of payment, after which caps would be based on the actual costs of the digital euro (Council press release). Parliament's position also caps merchant and inter-PSP fees and would make offline payments entirely fee-free (Legislative Observatory summary). Parliament's Legislative Train records the remaining divergence on compensation as the Council's "national exemptions" against Parliament's "no worse off" principle (Legislative Train, 25 October 2026). The Commission text would make the capped amounts uniform across the euro area; whether that survives, the benchmark and the length of any transition are still being negotiated.

Merchant associations want something simpler. A coalition statement published by EuroCommerce on 2 March 2026 proposes a permanent, uniform merchant service charge of 0.1% capped at 4 cents per online transaction, and no charge for offline payments, arguing that "comparable means of payment" is too arbitrary a benchmark (EuroCommerce). That is a lobbying position, not a legislative text.

The ECB has published an illustrative comparison. In a technical annex for the European Parliament's ECON committee, dated 17 November 2025, it estimates that European merchants pay around 0.50% per transaction on average for international card schemes and that smaller merchants can pay up to three to four times more than large ones; it argues that a cap would mainly benefit smaller merchants (ECB technical annex). This is the ECB's own estimate, not a promised price; merchants and PSPs have questioned its cost assumptions, as recorded in the ECB's report on the digital euro's fit in the payment ecosystem.

Integration work (checkout pages, point-of-sale software, enterprise resource planning (ERP) connectors) and internal process changes sit outside any cap. In the pilot, the ECB is explicit that merchants bear their own costs and no subsidy is foreseen, although pilot PSPs may not charge participating merchants fees for pilot payment services (ECB pilot FAQ). To compare what you pay on existing methods today, our euro payment fee calculator lets you model your own provider rates.

Would a business hold digital euro balances?

Under the design the ECB has described, no, at least not online. This shapes cash management and reconciliation more than any other design choice.

The ECB's FAQ says the digital euro would be available to people, businesses and public entities in the euro area (ECB FAQ), but for businesses that chiefly means receiving payments. The ECB's 2023 stocktake states that business users would have a zero holding limit: they could not accumulate digital euro, but could make specific types of payment, initially payments and refunds. The limit would be enforced by automatic defunding (the "waterfall") whenever a payment is received, moving the money to the merchant's commercial bank account (ECB stocktake).

The same document adds three details that matter in practice:

• Defunding would by default happen per transaction, but PSPs could offer other schedules, such as one aggregated daily pay-out collected by the acquirer.
• Offline acceptance is an exception. Offline digital euro would sit in the merchant's acceptance device until it can connect and defund. How much a device may hold, and how many consecutive offline payments it may accept, had not been decided.
• To pay a refund, the merchant's side would need a "reverse waterfall" that pulls funds from the linked bank account, since the business holds no balance to pay from.

Holding limits for individuals are separate and not fixed. The legal form of the business rule is still being negotiated. Parliament's position says that, as a general rule, legal persons should hold no digital euro, but could accumulate incoming payments for up to 24 hours so that they can be moved to an ordinary account in batches (Legislative Observatory summary). That would be closer to a daily sweep than to per-transaction defunding. Treat the zero limit as current ECB design, not settled law. The practical effect: no new treasury balance to manage. Your money still ends up in your ordinary euro account; the change is in the route and the records.

What role would banks and payment service providers play?

Everything a merchant touches would go through a supervised intermediary: the ECB describes PSPs as the main point of contact for merchants and businesses (ECB FAQ). In the ECB's description, the PSP would onboard the business separately from its owner as a private person, issue one or more digital euro account numbers (DEANs), upgrade the physical or virtual terminal, and provide reporting, ideally inside existing tools (ECB stocktake). The Eurosystem would run the settlement infrastructure; on 30 October 2026 the ECB announced the network service providers that will connect PSPs and national central banks to it (ECB news). Outside the pilot, merchants would not contract with the ECB, so treat any vendor offering "direct ECB access" or a business digital euro wallet today with suspicion.

How would digital euro checkout work in store, online and offline?

The ECB has described several payment journeys, all still subject to the final rulebook (ECB rulebook page):

• In store: contactless (NFC) or QR code at the terminal, initiated from a banking app, a dedicated app or, in some designs, a card.
• Online: at checkout the customer would be shown a QR code to scan, a link to pay, or asked for a DEAN or alias such as a mobile number, then confirm in their app (ECB stocktake).
• Recurring: a customer could authorise recurring e-commerce payments, with a maximum amount agreed where the amount varies.
• Offline: payments settled directly between two nearby devices without network connection, after the payer has funded an offline balance. Only payer and payee would know the personal transaction details (ECB FAQ).

Offline acceptance allows payments during a network outage, but the device then holds value until it reconnects; terminal requirements, device limits and liability for it are not yet public.

What would change for an e-commerce checkout?

For an online shop, the digital euro would appear as one more payment option supplied by the acquirer or payment gateway, not as something the merchant builds against the ECB. The customer would choose it, be passed to their own banking or wallet app by QR code, link or alias, confirm, and the shop would receive a payment confirmation. The details that matter for e-commerce are the ones not yet final: how the option is presented at checkout, how recurring and variable-amount payments are authorised, and what data the confirmation carries back to the order system. Offline digital euro works only between devices close to each other, so it is not a route for remote sales.

The pilot gives a first look. The ECB's merchant call focused on remote e-commerce and m-commerce payments, and in-store pilot payments are expected at venues such as staff canteens at participating central banks, using software-based terminals on ordinary devices (ECB merchant call, 15 September 2026; ECB pilot FAQ). Our pilot page covers who takes part, selection and dates.

How would refunds work?

The ECB's design says refunds would be possible for all digital euro transactions regardless of merchant size, and that a digital euro payment could only be refunded in digital euro. Refunds would not have to follow a complaint, and should happen within a reasonable time in line with the merchant's other digital payment methods. The scheme rulebook is to set the detailed rules and timelines (ECB stocktake).

Because the merchant holds no online balance, each refund draws on the linked bank account, producing debits to match to the original sale. If the customer's wallet has no room under their holding limit and no linked account, the ECB notes the refund could fail, so a documented fallback is needed. Disputes are separate; liability would sit with the PSP, the merchant or the consumer depending on the case, never with the Eurosystem.

What changes for reconciliation and accounting?

The monetary unit stays the euro, so there is no currency translation, no revaluation and no new asset class on the balance sheet. A digital euro receipt is a euro receipt. Questions about specific accounting or VAT treatment should go to your adviser once the rules are final, but the operational impact is in data, not in valuation.

The main changes are in how payments arrive and what references come with them. Consider an illustrative online shop on one trading day, using the design described above. The figures are invented and no fee level is assumed, because none exists.

The same three sales can produce three credits or one, gross or net, plus a refund that appears as an unrelated debit a day later; under Parliament's 24-hour rule, a daily batch could become the norm. Merchants already face this with card settlements. The risk is another set of identifiers (DEANs, transaction and pay-out references) in an order-to-cash process that may already rely on manual matching, so keep orders, payments, pay-outs, refunds and fees as separate linked records. Our SEPA reconciliation guide covers the matching logic for current euro payments, and our reconciliation software works with existing bank statements and invoices. It does not process digital euro payments, because there are none to process.

Is the digital euro a business-to-business payment rail?

Not as currently designed, which limits the B2B impact of the digital euro. It is an instrument for retail payments. The ECB's described use cases are person-to-person, point-of-sale, e-commerce and public-sector payments (ECB stocktake). With a zero holding limit for business users, it is built for consumers paying businesses, not for settling supplier invoices, payroll or intra-group flows, which will continue to run on SEPA credit transfers, including instant transfers.

Two adjacent developments are sometimes confused with it: the ECB's wholesale work, including the Pontes service launched on 21 September 2026 for settling tokenised-asset transactions between financial institutions (ECB press release), and the ECB's innovation platform experiments with conditional payments, electronic receipts and split payments, which are not commitments (see our innovation page). If a vendor pitches the digital euro as a way to settle your B2B invoices from 2029, ask which official document supports it.

What can a business do now, and what should it wait for?

Most investment should wait for the adopted regulation, the final scheme rulebook and your provider's actual product, contract and price list. Ignore entirely offers to "invest" in the digital euro, early-access wallets or pilot places sold by third parties; the ECB says it never asks for investments, money or personal information (ECB pilot FAQ). The low-cost steps below commit you to nothing and also help with the payment methods you use today.

1. Note the facts that decide your status. Record whether you accept card or other digital payments, your headcount and turnover, and which exemptions in the current texts might apply. Revisit this when the law is adopted.
2. Map every payment channel. List terminals, web checkouts, apps, recurring billing and marketplaces, with the provider and contract behind each.
3. Ask your providers three questions. Will you support digital euro acceptance? Will settlement be per transaction or aggregated? Will fees be netted or invoiced?
4. Separate events from money. Make sure orders, payment confirmations, pay-outs, refunds and fees are distinct records with their own references.
5. Add room for new identifiers. Ensure your ERP or accounting tool can store an additional transaction and pay-out reference without overloading free-text fields.
6. Write a refund fallback. Define what staff do when a refund to the original method fails, and how that is recorded.
7. Plan for outages. Decide whether offline acceptance would matter for your business and what end-of-day checks it would need.
8. Minimise data. Note what customer data you genuinely need for each payment and refund, in line with your data protection obligations.
9. Screen vendors. Reject claims of ECB endorsement, live digital euro processing or guaranteed fee levels.
10. Set a review date. Follow official sources and our news page, and reassess when the regulation is adopted and the rulebook is finalised.

What is still uncertain?

• Adoption and issuance. The end-2026 target for the regulation is not a fact, and 2029 is only a readiness goal pending a Governing Council decision.
• Who must accept. Size thresholds and exemptions depend on the final text; the Commission and Parliament differ on whether small (not only micro) enterprises are exempt.
• Fee levels. No cap has been expressed as a number, and the method (comparable payments, costs, "no worse off") is disputed.
• Business holding rules in law. The zero holding limit is ECB design work; Parliament would allow up to 24 hours. Offline device limits are also open.
• Roll-out. Parliament wants a roll-out phase of at least 24 months after issuance is authorised, which would affect when an acceptance obligation could bite.
• Technical details. The rulebook is in draft (v0.91). Terminal compatibility, settlement timing and reporting formats are not final.
• Pilot findings. The pilot has not started, and its results may change the design.

Frequently asked questions

When could a business first accept the digital euro?

Outside the pilot, not before an issuance decision, which the ECB aims to be ready for in 2029 if the regulation is adopted by the end of 2026; our timeline tracks the conditions. Selected pilot merchants could take beta digital euro payments (no legal tender status) during the 12-month pilot from the second half of 2027.

Can my business still join the pilot?

Not through the main merchant call. Applications closed at 17:00 CET on 27 October 2026, and the ECB says the outcome will be announced by early 2027. National central banks may recruit additional local merchants via separate calls; the Deutsche Bundesbank, for example, is seeking in-store merchants in Germany until 20 November 2026. Details are on our pilot page.

Will small businesses have to accept the digital euro?

Only if they already take comparable digital payments, on the current texts. The Commission exempts firms with fewer than 10 staff or up to €2 million turnover or balance sheet, and Parliament extends the exemption to small enterprises and the self-employed, in both cases only where they do not accept other digital payments. The final thresholds are not yet agreed.

Would an online shop have to offer the digital euro at checkout?

If the shop is subject to the obligation, it could not exclude the digital euro through standard terms. How prominently the option must appear at checkout is not set out in the official texts and summaries we reviewed, and will depend on the final regulation and scheme rules.

Will accepting the digital euro be cheaper than cards?

The ECB argues it should be, especially for small merchants, because of the proposed cap and the absence of scheme fees. No fee levels have been set, and merchant groups dispute some of the ECB's assumptions. Integration costs are not capped.

Does the digital euro replace SEPA or instant transfers for invoices?

No. It is designed for retail payments. Supplier invoices, payroll and other business-to-business flows would continue to use SEPA credit transfers and existing banking services.

Do I need new hardware?

Possibly not. The ECB says it aims for contactless acceptance without requiring merchants to change or upgrade terminals, but this depends on your provider and the final technical standards.

Sources

• ECB, FAQs on the digital euro (accessed 5 November 2026)
• ECB, Digital euro pilot (accessed 5 November 2026)
• ECB, FAQs on the digital euro pilot (accessed 5 November 2026)
• ECB, Call for e-commerce and m-commerce merchants, 15 September 2026 (accessed 5 November 2026)
• ECB, A stocktake on the digital euro, October 2023 (accessed 5 November 2026)
• ECB, Preparation phase closing report, October 2025 (accessed 5 November 2026)
• ECB, The digital euro: key aspects at a glance, technical annex, 17 November 2025 (accessed 5 November 2026)
• ECB, Fit of the digital euro in the payment ecosystem report (accessed 5 November 2026)
• ECB, Digital euro scheme rulebook (accessed 5 November 2026)
• ECB, ECB selects network service providers for the digital euro, 30 October 2026 (accessed 5 November 2026)
• ECB, Eurosystem brings central bank money to tokenised finance, 21 September 2026 (accessed 5 November 2026)
• European Commission, Proposal for a Regulation on the establishment of the digital euro, COM(2023) 369 (accessed 5 November 2026)
• Council of the EU, Council agrees position on the digital euro, 19 December 2025 (accessed 5 November 2026)
• European Parliament, Digital euro: MEPs ready to start negotiations, 9 July 2026 (accessed 5 November 2026)
• European Parliament, Legislative Observatory, summary of the ECON report A10-0185/2026, 26 June 2026 (accessed 5 November 2026)
• European Parliament, Legislative Train: digital euro, update of 25 October 2026 (accessed 5 November 2026)
• EuroCommerce, Merchants need the simplest digital euro fee model, 2 March 2026 (accessed 5 November 2026)