80% to 93%?

with my payroll clients it is a mixture.. I email the payroll stubs to my clients and a few still write checks out or loads laser checks into their printer and the stub and check print right out on that laser check..but i would say a majority of them either log into their bank and drop in the nets or have me do that step also.  

We are seeing our small business clients using direct deposit more and more.  So 80% doesn't sound unrealistic.  The 93% sounds like it could be a little high, but not impossible.

"I believe approximately 1/2 of private sector employees are employed by small businesses. I would imagine that most small businesses do not use direct deposit for their employees"

My exposure mainly is to the businesses using QuickBooks, and nearly all of them do online/electronic payroll (inhouse or by their CPA). I taught payroll as a separate class for 8 years. The businesses would be considered small, even though there might be more than one location (one coffee/cafe company has 9 locations). If you consider that a small employer might have 5-50 staff, and a large employer might have 4,000-12,000, then I would not doubt those numbers based on staff, not on companies.

It's not for the same reason, but is the same process for one of my clients who runs an HOA with nearly 500 accounts. Everything is split into ACH batches, so even though they have monthly fees, they process different neighborhoods on different weeks.

Fraud avoidance is another reason. Nothing that is done by paper is securable. It's been 15 years since I ran payroll for an employer, and I'd been doing it by ACH template through the bank login since about 2002. You get a little dongle that is a random security code generator.

And a big impetus to change over to ACH/EFT/direct deposit is the "get your money now" services which allow paydays to be based on shift end. Gig workers get this, as "instant cashout."

The thing about small businesses is that they are small.  Yes, there are many of them.  No, they don't employ much of the work force. 

"According to the Census Bureau 2018 County Business Patterns survey, more than half (54%) of all employer businesses in 2018 had fewer than five employees but they   only accounted for 5.5% of total employment in all industries."

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/01/what-is-a-small-business.html

And even many of those are now using payroll processing companies like ADP.  

This is where the 93% figure comes from:

"More than 93% of U.S. workers receive their pay via direct deposit, according to the 2022 “Getting Paid in America” survey from the American Payroll Association."

https://www.creditkarma.com/money/i/what-time-does-direct-deposit-hit#