Same Day ACH cutoff times
Three windows close each banking day. Miss the last one and the file becomes a standard next-day entry.
The three windows
FedACH accepts Same Day files in three batches per banking day. The submission deadline and the settlement time for each are fixed.
| Submit by | Settles |
|---|---|
| 10:30 AM ET | 1:00 PM ET |
| 2:45 PM ET | 5:00 PM ET |
| 4:45 PM ET | 6:00 PM ET |
The third window was added in March 2021; material written before then describes only two. Both credits and debits are eligible for Same Day processing.
Your bank's deadline is the one that binds
The times above are the Federal Reserve's. They are not the times you work to. An originating institution has to assemble, validate, and transmit its file before the Fed's window closes, so it publishes its own cutoffs, and those are earlier — sometimes by minutes, often by hours. A payment submitted at 4:30 PM ET is comfortably inside the Fed's last window and may still be too late for the bank carrying it.
This is the most common reason a payment expected to land same day does not. Confirm the cutoff your ODFI publishes and treat it, not the Federal Reserve's, as the deadline.
Same Day runs on banking days only
All three windows exist only on days Federal Reserve Banks are open. There is no Saturday, Sunday, or federal holiday Same Day processing, so a Friday afternoon file that misses the last window settles Monday, and one submitted before a holiday weekend settles later still. Check whether the Fed is open today or the closure schedule for the year.
The per-payment limit
Nacha caps a Same Day ACH payment at $1 million. The limit rose from $100,000 in March 2022. It applies per payment rather than per file, and a payment above it is not rejected outright: it is handled as a standard entry instead, settling on the ordinary one to two banking day schedule.
Get the date for a specific file
These are the rules in general. For a particular submission date and time, the settlement date calculator applies the windows and closures and returns the settlement date. Working backwards from a payday instead? Use the payroll cutoff calculator. For how the windows compare with standard timing, see how long an ACH transfer takes.