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Just one year since its launch, the Zelle tag, a personalized identifier to make it easier for small businesses to accept Zelle payments, is in use with more than 1 million small businesses and has an average daily enrollment of 3,500 in the first two quarters of 2026, Zelle says.
In the first half of 2026, nearly $5.8 billion was received by SMBs with a Zelle tag, which launched in September. Zelle tag is a unique username-like identifier with six to 40 characters. Zelle’s overall volume from small businesses for the first six months of 2026 totaled more than $200 billion in sent or received transactions.
Zelle, a unit of Early Warning Services LLC, debuted in 2017 as a bank account-based peer-to-peer payment service, but has broadened since then with the Zelle Forward program. The inaugural part was in March when Bank of America Corp. and Zelle collaborated to process disbursements from Donor Advised Funds, enabling nonprofit organizations to receive charitable grant funding in near real time. Then, in April, Truist Financial Corp. said it would test Zelle in a bill-payment pilot.
Zelle tag use is especially popular in the real estate, health services, construction and specialty contractors, and transportation categories, Zelle says. Some fast-growing ones are amusement and recreation services, membership organizations, and automotive repair and parking.
The benefit to small business is a reduction in reliance on cash or checks for payments, Zelle says. “Small businesses and their customers can use Zelle as an alternative to cash and checks. By doing so, it eliminates the need to carry cash or deposit checks and wait for them to clear,” a Zelle spokesperson says. “Growing adoption of Zelle tag also demonstrates how small businesses are embracing digital tools that make it easy for customers to pay them.”
Overall small-business activity on the Zelle network comprises 8.3 million enrolled small-business accounts on its network of more than 2,400 banks and credit unions, Zelle says.
