“Cash is king”. We often hear this saying, however, the global economy increasingly favors digital payment systems. However, in the era of a „No Kings” public discourse mindset, a counter-movement has started emerging to protect physical currency. Governments and citizens are pushing back against the prospect of a cashless society, arguing that cash is essential for financial inclusion, privacy, and economic resilience. At the forefront of this movement is the elevation of cash usage to a constitutional right.

Hungary’s Fundamental Law: Article XIII

In April 2025, the Hungarian Parliament passed the 15th Amendment to its Fundamental Law. Among various provisions, this amendment introduced a significant change to Article XIII, which traditionally protected property rights.

The amended text now explicitly states: “Everyone shall have the right to property and inheritance as well as to to pay in cash.”

By placing the right to use cash alongside property and inheritance, the Fundamental Law has elevated physical currency to a fundamental constitutional protection. The rationale provided by the government centers on preventing financial exclusion and ensuring that citizens do not become entirely vulnerable to the technical or market-driven failures of electronic financial systems.

International Examples

Hungary is not alone in its defense strategy of physical currency. Various nations have taken constitutional or legislative steps to ensure cash remains a viable public good and accessible and usable for the population.

Slovakia stands as the pioneer of this constitutional trend, having successfully amended its constitution in June 2023 to explicitly guarantee the right to use cash. The amendment was driven by a coalition of lawmakers who feared that a potential “digital euro” introduced by the European Central Bank (ECB) could eventually displace physical money, thereby threatening financial privacy and autonomy. The Slovak provision specifically frames cash not just as a payment method, but as a pillar of sovereignty and personal freedom, ensuring that the physical issuance of legal tender remains a protected state obligation regardless of future digital innovations.

Austria has similarly witnessed a robust public and political movement to constitutionalize cash usage, championed heavily by former Chancellor Karl Nehammer since late 2023. Following widespread public petitions and the “Cash Initiative” (Bargeld-Volksbegehren), the Austrian government has been gridlocked in debates over the precise wording of a constitutional safeguard. The Austrian argument is deeply cultural; with one of the highest cash-usage rates in the Eurozone, the populace views physical money as an essential issue of data protection. While the legal text has faced bureaucratic hurdles regarding its compatibility with EU law, the political consensus remains firmly committed to preserving the anonymity and reliability of cash transactions.

Norway, historically one of the world’s most digitized economies, executed a sharp legislative U-turn in October 2024 to strengthen consumer rights. The Storting (the Norwegian Parliament) amended the Financial Contracts Act to close loopholes that previously allowed “card-only” businesses to proliferate. The new rules follow a strict approach. If a business accepts any form of digital payment on-premises, it must also accept cash, with the government explicitly citing “societal preparedness” as the justification. This move was largely a response to warnings from the Directorate for Civil Protection, which highlighted that in the event of a cyberattack or prolonged power outage, a cashless Norway would be paralyzed, making physical currency a matter of national security. In Norway, the protection is not elevated to a constitutional level but the amended Act can still be considered a solid safeguard to protect the possibility of making cash payments.

Belgium has taken a more infrastructural approach, focusing on the availability of cash rather than just the acceptance of it. In response to the rapid removal of ATMs by major banks, the Belgian federal government passed the “Federal Cash Access Law”. Instead of relying on market forces, this legislation imposes a mandatory density requirement on the banking sector, stipulating that a functioning ATM must be accessible within a five-kilometer radius for 95% of the population. This “universal service obligation” treats cash access similarly to utilities like water or electricity, recognizing that the right to use cash is meaningless if citizens cannot withdraw it from their accounts. This approach of right to cash was also supported by the ECB in a public statement.

The United States presents a fragmented but increasingly vocal landscape, where the battle for cash is being fought at the state and municipal levels rather than through a federal constitutional amendment. While the “Payment Choice Act” has been introduced in Congress to federally mandate cash acceptance for retail transactions under $500, it has yet to pass. In the meantime, dozens of jurisdictions – including the states of New Jersey, Colorado, and Rhode Island, as well as major cities like Philadelphia and San Francisco – have enacted laws banning “cashless” brick-and-mortar stores. These bans are primarily framed as civil rights issues, arguing that cashless stores discriminate against “unbanked” populations, the elderly, and lower-income communities who may lack access to credit cards or digital wallets.

China offers perhaps the most distinct example, enforcing cash acceptance through aggressive regulatory intervention rather than constitutional rights. Despite leading the world in mobile payments via Alipay and WeChat Pay, the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) has instated a zero-tolerance policy for merchants who refuse banknotes, culminating in the tightened regulations that took effect this month, February 2026. The PBOC regularly conducts “grid inspections” and levies public fines against violators – ranging from utility companies to tourist attractions – to send a message that the Renminbi in physical form is the only legal tender. The Chinese state views the rejection of cash not as a business innovation, but as a challenge to the state’s monetary authority and a barrier to financial inclusion for the rural elderly.

Constitutional and Legal Issues

The elevation of cash from a “legal tender” to a constitutional right raises complex legal questions that scholars and the media are only beginning to unravel in its entirety. The most immediate conflict is the tension with the freedom of contract. In most market economies, the constitution protects the right of private enterprises to conduct business on their own terms. (e.g.: Hungarian Fundamental Law Article M) By mandating cash acceptance, the state overrides this freedom, effectively conscripting private businesses to maintain the infrastructure for physical money (e.g.: safe desposits, armored transport, change handling) even against their will. Legal challenges in Europe are expected to focus on whether this state interference is “proportional”. That is, whether the burden placed on a small coffee shop to handle cash outweighs the societal benefit of financial inclusion.

Furthermore, there is a looming jurisdictional clash with European Union Law. For Eurozone members like Slovakia, Austria, and potentially future members like, monetary policy is the exclusive competence of the European Central Bank (ECB). While the ECB approves of cash, it maintains that the definition of “legal tender” is a matter of EU law, not national constitutions. If the EU were to eventually decide that a “Digital Euro” should have primacy, national constitutional amendments protecting physical cash could be rendered void by the supremacy of EU treaties, precipitating a major sovereignty crisis between member states and Brussels.

There is also the paradox of “relative” human rights. Unlike absolute rights such as the prohibition of torture or freedom of expression, the “right to cash” must legally coexist with the state’s duty to fight crime. Because cash is the preferred medium for money laundering, tax evasion, and terror financing, no “right to cash” can be absolute. This forces constitutional jurisdictions to engage in a difficult balancing act. They must uphold the citizen’s right to pay anonymously while simultaneously permitting the government to ban cash for large transactions (e.g.: buying real estate or luxury cars). This creates a strange constitutional category – a “fundamental right” that is strictly capped at a specific monetary value, creating a precedent that could be awkwardly applied to other economic activities in the future.

Beyond the immediate logistical challenges lies a deeper philosophical critique regarding the phenomenon of “human rightism”, or rights inflation. Legal scholars argue that elevating specific economic mechanisms – like the use of banknotes – to the status of fundamental human rights risks diluting the sanctity of constitutional law. Classically, constitutions are reserved for protecting the most essential conditions of human dignity, such as freedom of speech, religion, and protection from torture. Critics warn that by adding regulatory details like payment methods to this list, states are effectively trivializing their supreme laws, turning them into rigid administrative rulebooks rather than enduring charters of liberty. This “rights hypertrophy” creates a dangerous precedent where any utility deemed important – from internet access to gasoline vehicles – could demand similar constitutional shielding, eventually paralyzing the state’s ability to adapt to technological shifts. According to the this logic, the examples of Norway, Belgium and the USA would be the ones to be followed in that such new rights shall be protected in Acts or other laws and not in constitutions, allowing for broader variability and adaptability.

Closely linked to this is the emerging legal concept of the “right to an analog life”, or in other words, the right to be offline. As governance and commerce digitize, a citizen’s ability to exist without a digital footprint is rapidly vanishing. Constitutional proponents of cash argue that in a fully cashless society, participation in the economy effectively requires entering a forced contract with private third parties – banks, card processors, and tech giants – compelling citizens to surrender their data just to purchase basic necessities. In this view, the constitutional protection of cash is less about economics and more about preserving the “right to anonymity”. Unlike digital transactions, which create a permanent metadata trail of a citizen’s movements and habits, cash leaves no trace, acting as a constitutional check against the “panopticon” of corporate surveillance and the commodification of private behavior.

As already mentioned briefly above, there is also a profound question of intergenerational equity and economic burden. Maintaining a physical cash infrastructure – printing notes, securing armored transport, managing vaults, and servicing ATMs – is an immensely expensive endeavor. As younger generations overwhelmingly shift toward digital wallets and instant payments, the per-transaction cost of using physical money also increases significantly. By constitutionally mandating the availability of cash, the state effectively forces the digital majority (and the taxpayer) to permanently subsidize the analog preferences of a shrinking minority. This raises difficult questions about the fair allocation of societal resources, whether a society struggling to fund digital modernization should be constitutionally bound to spend billions propping up a legacy system that fewer people use every year? This question, however, is yet to arise and yet to be answered as well.

The elevation of cash from a mere medium of exchange to a constitutional right marks a huge shift in the relationship between the citizen and the state. It is clear that the “right to pay in cash” has become a proxy for a much larger battle, which is the struggle for autonomy in an increasingly surveillance-driven world. While digital payments offer undeniable efficiency and transparency, the rush to eliminate cash risks creating a fragile monoculture, one vulnerable to technical collapse, corporate censorship, and systemic exclusion. By safeguarding cash or its use in their (fundamental) laws, these nations are asserting that economic efficiency cannot come at the cost of human dignity or the right to exist outside the digital grid.

However, the legal and practical contradictions remain formidable. As long as cash facilitates crime and digital systems offer superior convenience, these constitutional amendments will face constant pressure from both market forces and supranational regulators. The future of money, therefore, will likely not be a binary choice, but a complex hybrid, where “the right to use cash” is preserved not as the dominant standard, but as a critical “emergency brake” for democracy, ensuring that no citizen can be fully de-platformed from the economy by a server outage or a policy change. In this light, the “right to cash” is perhaps less about money than it is about power. It is a constitutional declaration that in the 21st century, the option to remain analog is not backwards thinking, but a necessary condition of freedom.

Dorina Bosits is a law student at Széchenyi István University, also having completed an exchange and research semester at Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz. She also holds a degree in International Finance and Accounting from the University of Applied Sciences Wiener Neustadt.

Her academic focus lies at the intersection of constitutional and financial law, with research interests including digitalization, data protection, freedom of speech, and space law. She has received several academic honors, including the National Higher Education Scholarship and the “Student of the Year 2023” award. Dorina is a member of ELSA Győr and the Mathias Corvinus Collegium Law School, and was part of the Széchenyi Moot Court Team awarded third place in the Manfred Lachs Space Law Moot Court competition.