.0565 per same day forward item against Same Day ACH Statistics 2026
By Axis Intelligence Research
Co-author: Sarah Davis | Last updated: August 23, 2026 | License: CC BY 4.0
Same Day ACH moved 1.45 billion payments worth $3.92 trillion in 2025 and is running 26.6% higher in 2026. According to Axis Intelligence Research, each of those payments carried $0.0565 in published interbank cost against $0.0035 for a standard ACH item — a 16.14x settlement premium on the fastest lane in the ACH Network.
Quick Answer
Same Day ACH handled 1,447.69 million payments valued at $3.92 trillion in 2025, up 16.7% in volume and 21.4% in value (Nacha). Through the first half of 2026 it reached 838.7 million payments worth nearly $2.4 trillion, up 26.6%. According to Axis Intelligence Research, the Same Day ACH Maturity Index (SDMI) reads 163.2 for 2025 against a 2022 baseline of 100, and the Same Day Settlement Premium (SDSP) stands at 16.14x under 2026 published fees.
Key Findings
- According to Nacha’s full-year 2025 results published January 28, 2026, Same Day ACH carried 1.45 billion payments valued at $3.92 trillion, growing 16.7% in volume and 21.4% in value over 2024.
- According to Axis Intelligence Research, a Same Day ACH forward item costs $0.0565 in published interbank fees against $0.0035 for a standard forward item — a Same Day Settlement Premium of 16.14x, of which 92% is the Nacha Same Day Entry Fee rather than operator cost.
- According to Axis Intelligence Research, the Nacha Same Day Entry Fee transferred $75.28 million from originating institutions to receiving institutions in 2025, and $43.61 million in the first half of 2026 alone.
- According to Axis Intelligence Research, the Same Day ACH Maturity Index reads 163.2 for 2025, up from 145.3 in 2024, 111.6 in 2023 and a 2022 baseline of 100.
- According to Axis Intelligence Research, the average Same Day ACH payment was worth $2,708 in 2025 against $2,640 for every other payment on the network — an urgency premium of just 2.57%, far below what same-day pricing implies.
How Many Same Day ACH Payments Were Made in 2025?
Same Day ACH handled 1,447.69 million payments valued at $3.92 trillion in 2025, out of the 35.19 billion payments carried across the whole rail that year — the wider picture sits in our ACH payments statistics pillar. Volume rose 16.7% and value rose 21.4% over 2024, per Nacha’s full-year 2025 results published January 28, 2026. Same Day ACH averaged 5.8 million payments per day across the year, and 7.8 million per day in December 2025, when it set a monthly record of 172.1 million payments.
The 2025 total splits into 821.25 million debits and 626.44 million credits. That split is the most under-read number in ACH data, and the section below on composition explains why.
Same Day ACH Volume by Year, 2016–2025
| Year | Credits (millions) | Debits (millions) | Total payments (millions) | Milestone that year | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 13.0 | — | 13.0 | Launch, credits only (September) | Nacha |
| 2017 | 75.0 | — | 75.0 | Debits enabled | Nacha |
| 2018 | 98.0 | 79.0 | 178.0 | Faster funds availability for credits | Nacha |
| 2019 | 147.0 | 102.0 | 250.0 | Faster funds availability for credits | Nacha |
| 2020 | 178.5 | 168.7 | 347.0 | Per-payment limit raised to $100,000 | Nacha |
| 2021 | 273.1 | 330.7 | 603.0 | Operating hours extended by two hours | Nacha |
| 2022 | 322.7 | 374.8 | 697.5 | Per-payment limit raised to $1 million | Nacha |
| 2023 | 416.2 | 437.3 | 853.4 | B2B, payroll, claims, account transfers | Nacha |
| 2024 | 585.4 | 654.6 | 1,240.0 | Crossed one billion payments | Nacha |
| 2025 | 626.44 | 821.25 | 1,447.69 | Consumer internet payment growth | Nacha |
Source: Nacha Same Day ACH, retrieved August 23, 2026. Credit and debit components in 2018 and 2019 sum to one million fewer payments than the published annual totals; we reproduce Nacha’s figures as published rather than silently reconciling them.
A precision note worth having, because share math depends on it. Most published summaries put 2024 Same Day ACH volume at “1.2 billion.” Nacha’s own component data gives 1,240.0 million, and the 45.3% growth rate Nacha reported for 2023 to 2024 only reconciles against 1,240.0 (1,240.0 ÷ 853.4 = 1.453). Using 1.20 billion instead understates the 2024 share of network volume by 12 basis points. Axis Intelligence Research uses 1,240.0 million throughout, and every ratio on this page is computed from it.
Cumulatively, Same Day ACH has carried 5,704.59 million payments — 5.70 billion — across its first ten calendar years, from a standing start of 1.3 million payments in its first six processing days in September 2016.
Sarah Davis: Ten years in, the interesting question is not whether Same Day grew. It is which direction the money is being pulled. Debits have outnumbered credits every year since 2021, which means the dominant same-day use case is not somebody rushing a payment out — it is somebody reaching in and pulling funds. Cash concentration, payroll funding, merchant settlement. That is a treasury product wearing a payments-innovation label, and it lines up with the vendor-payment flows tracked in our B2B payments statistics coverage.
Source: Axis Intelligence Research — CC BY 4.0
Same Day ACH Growth Rate: How Fast Is It Actually Growing?
Growth accelerated in 2026 rather than tapering. Same Day ACH handled 403.0 million payments worth $1.1 trillion in the first quarter, up 23.6% in volume and 22.1% in value, and 435.7 million payments worth $1.3 trillion in the second quarter, up 29.5% and 28.1%, per Nacha’s second-quarter 2026 release dated July 30, 2026. First-half volume reached 838.7 million payments worth nearly $2.4 trillion.
Same Day ACH Compound Growth vs the Wider Network
| Period | Same Day ACH CAGR | ACH Network CAGR | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2017–2025 (8 years) | 44.78% | — | Nacha, Axis calculated |
| 2020–2025 (5 years) | 33.07% | — | Nacha, Axis calculated |
| 2022–2025 (3 years) | 27.56% | 5.46% | Nacha, Axis calculated |
Compound annual growth rates calculated by Axis Intelligence Research from Nacha annual volume figures, retrieved August 23, 2026.
According to Axis Intelligence Research, Same Day ACH volume grew 2.08 times between 2022 and 2025 while total ACH Network volume grew 1.17 times — a growth rate 5.05 times the network’s own over the same three years. That divergence, not the headline volume, is what a treasury team should be reading.
Same Day ACH reached 4.685% of all ACH Network payments in the second quarter of 2026, up from 4.528% in the first quarter and 4.114% for full-year 2025. The fast lane still carries fewer than five payments in a hundred after a decade of availability.
What Does a Same Day ACH Payment Actually Cost?
This is the question every article on Same Day ACH adoption skips, and it is the one that explains the adoption curve. So Axis Intelligence Research built a figure for it from the two published fee schedules that govern it.
SDSP: the Same Day Settlement Premium
SDSP — Same Day Settlement Premium. The multiple by which the published interbank cost of originating a Same Day ACH forward item exceeds a standard ACH forward item.
Formula: SDSP = (standard forward item fee + operator same-day surcharge + Nacha Same Day Entry Fee) ÷ standard forward item fee
2026 Per-Item Cost Stack
| Component | Standard ACH forward item | Same Day ACH forward item | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| FedACH forward origination item fee | $0.0035 | $0.0035 | Federal Reserve |
| FedACH SameDay Service surcharge | — | $0.0010 | Federal Reserve |
| Nacha Same Day Entry Fee | — | $0.0520 | Nacha, via Federal Reserve schedule |
| Total per item | $0.0035 | $0.0565 | Axis calculated |
Source: FedACH Services 2026 Fee Schedule, effective January 1, 2026, retrieved August 23, 2026. Stack computed by Axis Intelligence Research.
SDSP (2026) = $0.0565 ÷ $0.0035 = 16.14x. As of August 23, 2026.
Two things follow that are not obvious from the multiple alone.
First, the operator is not where the money goes. The Federal Reserve’s own same-day surcharge is a tenth of a cent. The Nacha Same Day Entry Fee is $0.052 and accounts for 92% of the same-day cost stack. That fee is collected from the originating institution and credited to the receiving institution under the ACH Rules — it is not revenue for Nacha or for the operator. It is a transfer payment designed to compensate receiving institutions for same-day processing they cannot decline. Originators also pay a $10.00 per routing number per month FedACH SameDay origination participation fee in any month they send at least one qualifying item.
Second, the transfer is now large. According to Axis Intelligence Research, applying the $0.052 per-item fee to Nacha’s published Same Day volume, the Same Day Entry Fee moved $75.28 million from originating institutions to receiving institutions in 2025 and $43.61 million in the first half of 2026. No published source states this figure; it falls directly out of two documents that are never read together.
Scope: SDSP measures published interbank fees only. It does not capture what an originating bank charges its corporate customer, which is negotiated and unpublished, nor internal processing cost. Treat it as the floor of the same-day price, not the price.
Cite this metric as: Axis Intelligence Research, Same Day Settlement Premium, 2026 reading, published August 23, 2026. CC BY 4.0.
Sarah Davis: Five and a third cents sounds like nothing until you put a denominator under it. On the average same-day payment it is a fifth of a basis point — genuinely trivial. On a payroll file of 40,000 items it is $2,260 to move the funding a day earlier. That is the whole adoption story in one calculation: same-day is cheap per dollar and expensive per item, so it wins on large payments and loses on batches of small ones, which is exactly the shape the volume data shows.
Is a Same Day ACH Payment Bigger Than a Regular One?
Barely, and that finding runs against the assumption built into same-day pricing.
Nacha publishes Same Day and total network figures but not the residual. Subtracting one from the other gives the average value of every ACH payment that was not sent same-day — a figure no one publishes and one that reframes the product.
2025 Average Payment Value, Same Day vs Everything Else
| Segment | Payments | Value | Average payment | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Same Day ACH | 1,447.69 million | $3.92 trillion | $2,708 | Nacha, Axis calculated |
| All other ACH Network payments | 33,742.31 million | $89.08 trillion | $2,640 | Axis calculated |
| ACH Network total | 35,190 million | $93.00 trillion | $2,643 | Nacha |
Residual segment derived by Axis Intelligence Research from Nacha full-year 2025 network and Same Day figures, retrieved August 23, 2026.
According to Axis Intelligence Research, the average Same Day ACH payment carried a 2.57% urgency premium over the average non-same-day ACH payment in 2025 — $2,708 against $2,640. A rail priced at 16.14x per item is carrying tickets 2.6% larger than the standard lane.
That gap is the clearest evidence available that Same Day ACH is not yet being used the way its pricing assumes. The per-item surcharge is built for a world where same-day is reserved for large, urgent, high-value payments. The realized data says it is being used across a ticket distribution that looks almost exactly like the network’s, which points at a growing share of routine consumer internet payments and account transfers — the same account-to-account plumbing examined in our digital wallet statistics analysis — rather than a concentration of treasury exceptions. Nacha itself attributed the 2025 increase partly to growth in consumer internet payments.
What Is the Same Day ACH Maturity Index?
Volume alone cannot tell you whether a payment product has matured or merely scaled. A rail can triple in size and still be a one-directional, single-use-case niche. So Axis Intelligence Research built a single trackable reading of how far Same Day ACH has moved from novelty toward infrastructure.
SDMI: definition, components and weights
SDMI — Same Day ACH Maturity Index. A composite of three Nacha-published measures, each indexed to its 2022 value = 100, then weighted.
| Component | Weight | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Same Day share of ACH Network volume | 45% | 2.325% | 2.710% | 3.691% | 4.114% |
| Debit share of Same Day volume | 30% | 53.735% | 51.236% | 52.790% | 56.728% |
| Same Day payments per business day | 25% | 2.790M | 3.414M | 4.960M | 5.791M |
| SDMI reading | 100.0 | 111.6 | 145.3 | 163.2 |
Sources: all component inputs are Nacha figures — Same Day volume and credit/debit split from the Nacha Same Day ACH page; network volume from Nacha annual releases (2022, 2024, 2025). Ratios and index computed by Axis Intelligence Research, retrieved August 23, 2026.
Formula: SDMI(y) = 0.45 x (SD_vol_share_y ÷ SD_vol_share_2022 x 100) + 0.30 x (SD_debit_share_y ÷ SD_debit_share_2022 x 100) + 0.25 x (SD_per_business_day_y ÷ SD_per_business_day_2022 x 100)
Baseline: 2022 = 100, the first full year under the $1 million per-payment limit and the first year with all three settlement windows in place for the whole period. This is the fourth computed reading. No readings before 2022 exist and none are implied.
Weights, and why. Displacement carries the heaviest weight at 45%, because share of network volume is the only component that is immune to the network simply getting bigger. The debit share at 30% is the maturity signal proper: a payment product used in both directions is embedded in treasury workflow, while a credit-only product is a convenience feature. Payments per business day at 25% captures absolute scale, which matters to operational readiness even though it moves with the same numerator as the first component — it is deliberately the smallest weight for that reason.
Business-day convention: 250 business days per year, applied uniformly across all years so the component measures throughput change rather than calendar variation.
Scope: SDMI describes composition and reach, not economics. It says nothing about what same-day costs or who profits from it. Read it beside the SDSP block above, not instead of it.
The 2025 reading of 163.2 decomposes cleanly. The displacement component reads 176.9 against baseline and per-business-day throughput reads 207.6, while the two-sided usage component reads only 105.6. Same Day ACH has more than doubled its daily throughput in three years while barely changing the balance between pushing and pulling money — and the debit share actually fell in 2023 before recovering. Growth has been broad, not structural.
Cite this metric as: Axis Intelligence Research, Same Day ACH Maturity Index, 2025 reading, published August 23, 2026. CC BY 4.0.
When Does the Same Day ACH Limit Increase to $10 Million?
September 17, 2027. Nacha members approved raising the per-payment limit from $1 million to $10 million, the fourth increase in the product’s history after $25,000 at launch, $100,000 in 2020 and $1 million in March 2022.
The move is a parity play: RTP raised its per-payment limit to $10 million in June 2025 and FedNow followed in November 2025, adoption curves we track in real-time payments statistics. The increase applies to all eligible SEC codes, to credits and debits, to consumer and business payments, and across all three settlement windows, per Nacha’s rule documentation. Separate dollar limits continue to apply to ARC, BOC, POP, RCK and XCK entries, and IAT entries remain ineligible for Same Day ACH.
What the Rulemaking Record Shows
| Request for comment result | Share of respondents | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Support raising the dollar limit | 87% | Nacha |
| Support raising it specifically to $10 million | 81% | Nacha |
| Believe the limit should be uniform across all Same Day entries | 74% | Nacha |
| Believe the estimated impacts are manageable and proportionate | 79% | Nacha |
| Supported the original March 2027 date or would prefer earlier | 77% | Nacha |
Source: Nacha, Increasing the Same Day ACH Dollar Limit to $10 Million, 117 responses to a fourth-quarter 2025 request for comment, retrieved August 23, 2026.
Nacha estimates the change makes $7 trillion to $8 trillion in additional annual ACH value eligible for same-day settlement. According to Axis Intelligence Research, the midpoint of that range is 1.91 times the entire 2025 Same Day ACH value of $3.92 trillion, and equals 8.06% of total 2025 ACH Network value. The eligibility pool is larger than the product.
Eligibility is not adoption, and the SDSP explains the gap: a $9 million invoice payment costs the same 5.65 cents to send same-day as a $90 one, which makes the fee irrelevant and the decision purely about liquidity and settlement risk. The prior increases support that reading — in 2022, the first year under the $1 million cap, Nacha reported Same Day value up 86.3% against volume up 15.5%. Limit changes move dollars, not counts.
There is also a settlement-timing consequence the rule documentation is unusually direct about. Larger balances will land at the 1:00 p.m., 5:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. Eastern settlement points, and Nacha advises receiving institutions to examine whether they routinely sit in a net-debit position late in the day. Fedwire remains open past the third same-day window, which is the stated fallback for funding an unexpected incoming position.
Sarah Davis: A $10 million ceiling does not turn Same Day ACH into a wire, and treasurers should not price it as one. Same-day still settles in three windows rather than on demand, and it remains reversible in a way a wire is not — a feature if you are paying, a credit exposure if you are receiving. The number to watch in late 2027 is not Same Day volume. It is whether Fedwire’s item count flattens.
Which Payments Are Not Eligible for Same Day ACH?
Eligibility rules explain part of why the share sits near 4% rather than 40%. Under the ACH Rules, FedACH’s SameDay Service excludes international transactions (IAT) — the segment covered in our cross-border payments statistics page — automated enrollment entries (ENR), and — until September 2027 — transactions above $1,000,000. An item also has to reach a same-day transmission deadline and must not carry a future date in the effective entry date field.
That last condition matters more than the dollar cap for most originators. A large share of ACH volume is recurring and pre-scheduled — payroll, mortgage collection, subscription billing — and pre-scheduled files are future-dated by design. They are not competing for same-day treatment; they are structurally outside it. The addressable pool for Same Day ACH is the unscheduled remainder, which makes 4.7% of network volume a considerably higher penetration of the eligible base than it looks.
Methodology
Collection. Every figure on this page was fetched from a primary source during production on August 22–23, 2026. Same Day ACH volume, value, credit/debit composition and the product milestone chronology come from the Nacha Same Day ACH page and Nacha quarterly and annual press releases. Network totals come from Nacha’s 2022, 2024 and 2025 full-year releases. Per-item fee data comes from the FedACH Services 2026 Fee Schedule, effective January 1, 2026. Eligibility rules come from the Federal Reserve’s FedACH SameDay Service page and Nacha’s rule documentation. No figure was taken from an aggregator, a competitor compilation or model memory.
Calculations. All shares, ratios, compound growth rates and index readings labeled as Axis Intelligence Research figures were computed in Python from the sourced inputs and are reproducible from the accompanying CSV. The 2023 network volume input to the SDMI is derived from Nacha’s stated 6.7% increase from 2023 to 2024 applied to the published 33.6 billion 2024 total, giving 31,490 million; the derivation is flagged in the CSV method note. Percentage shares use unrounded inputs and are reported to three decimals inside the index, two in prose.
Source discrepancies published, not reconciled. Nacha’s 2018 and 2019 credit and debit components each sum to one million fewer payments than the published annual totals. Nacha’s 2022 network value appears as $76.7 trillion in the full-year release. Both are reproduced as published. The widely circulated “1.2 billion” 2024 Same Day figure is a rounding of 1,240.0 million and is treated as such here, with the reasoning shown above.
What was refused. Two calculations were available and rejected. First, any per-window split of Same Day ACH volume across the 1:00 p.m., 5:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. settlement points: the windows are documented but volume by window is not published by Nacha or by either operator, and an estimate would be invention. Second, any Same Day ACH return-rate figure: Nacha enforces return-rate thresholds under its Operating Rules but does not publish a network-wide same-day return rate, and blending general ACH return data with same-day volume would produce a number with no defensible denominator.
About This Dataset
The companion CSV contains every figure cited above as an individual row, with value, unit, as-of date, source organization, source document, source URL, retrieval date, primary-source flag, Axis-calculated flag and a method note on each derived row. It covers Same Day ACH volume and credit/debit composition 2016–2025, quarterly 2026 data, the 2026 per-item fee stack, network comparatives, the $10 million rule record, and both Axis metrics.
License: CC BY 4.0. Free to use commercially and non-commercially with attribution.
Cite this dataset as: Axis Intelligence Research. Same Day ACH Statistics 2026. Axis Intelligence, 2026. https://axis-intelligence.com/same-day-ach-statistics/
Citation
APA Axis Intelligence Research. (2026). Same Day ACH statistics 2026: Volume, per-item cost, and the $10 million limit. Axis Intelligence. https://axis-intelligence.com/same-day-ach-statistics/
MLA Axis Intelligence Research. “Same Day ACH Statistics 2026: Volume, Per-Item Cost, and the $10 Million Limit.” Axis Intelligence, 23 Aug. 2026, axis-intelligence.com/same-day-ach-statistics/.
Chicago Axis Intelligence Research. “Same Day ACH Statistics 2026: Volume, Per-Item Cost, and the $10 Million Limit.” Axis Intelligence. August 23, 2026. https://axis-intelligence.com/same-day-ach-statistics/.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who pays the Nacha Same Day Entry Fee, and who receives it?
The originating institution pays $0.052 per Same Day forward item and the receiving institution is credited the same amount, under the ACH Rules. It is a transfer between institutions rather than revenue for Nacha or for an ACH Operator, and it exists because receiving institutions cannot decline same-day items. According to Axis Intelligence Research, that transfer totaled $75.28 million in 2025.
Why is the Same Day ACH share of network volume still under 5% after ten years?
Because eligibility, not demand, is the binding constraint for most volume. IAT and ENR entries are excluded outright, items above $1 million are excluded until September 2027, and any file carrying a future effective entry date is structurally outside same-day processing. Most recurring ACH — payroll, mortgage collection, subscription billing — is pre-scheduled by design. Measured against the unscheduled eligible base rather than total network volume, penetration is materially higher than 4.7%.
Do Same Day ACH debits or credits carry more volume?
Debits, and they have since 2021. In 2025 Same Day ACH carried 821.25 million debits against 626.44 million credits, a debit share of 56.73%. The debit-led pattern points at cash concentration, payroll funding and merchant settlement rather than at urgent outbound disbursement, which is how the product is usually marketed.
Is Same Day ACH cheaper than a wire for a $5 million payment?
On published interbank fees, dramatically — 5.65 cents against Fedwire’s per-transfer pricing. The relevant differences are not price. Same Day ACH settles at three fixed windows rather than on demand, it remains reversible under the ACH Rules where a wire is effectively final, and until September 17, 2027 a $5 million payment is not eligible at all. After that date the comparison becomes a settlement-risk and timing decision rather than a cost one.
How much additional ACH value becomes same-day eligible in September 2027?
Nacha estimates $7 trillion to $8 trillion in additional annual value. According to Axis Intelligence Research, the midpoint of that range is 1.91 times the entire 2025 Same Day ACH value and equals 8.06% of total 2025 ACH Network value. Eligibility is not adoption, but the pool being roughly twice the current product is the largest structural change in the rail’s history.
Does the higher limit apply to Same Day ACH debits as well as credits?
Yes. Nacha applied the increase to both directions specifically to preserve same-day reversals — a reversing debit of an erroneous credit has to be able to match the original amount — and to support payroll funding, which is typically executed as an ACH debit rather than a credit.
What should a receiving institution prepare for before September 2027?
Nacha’s guidance is to examine current same-day dollar flows for both typical and atypical behavior, and to identify whether the institution routinely holds a low reserve balance or sits in a net-debit position at the late settlement points. Larger balances will land at 1:00 p.m., 5:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. Eastern. Fedwire stays open past the third same-day window, which is the documented route to fund an unexpected incoming position.
How fast is Same Day ACH growing in 2026 compared with 2025?
Considerably faster. Volume grew 16.7% in full-year 2025, then 23.6% in the first quarter of 2026 and 29.5% in the second. First-half 2026 volume of 838.7 million payments was up 26.6% year over year, against 5.5% growth for the ACH Network overall.
Can Same Day ACH volume be broken down by settlement window?
Not from public data. The three windows are documented, but neither Nacha nor either ACH Operator publishes volume by window. Any figure attributing a share of same-day volume to the 1:00 p.m., 5:00 p.m. or 6:00 p.m. window without a named source document should be treated as unsourced — Axis Intelligence Research declined to estimate it for that reason.
Is Same Day ACH losing volume to RTP and FedNow?
Not in the aggregate, though the instant rails are taking specific high-urgency flows. Same Day ACH added roughly 207 million payments in 2025 alone. The rail-by-rail arithmetic, including the displacement ratio between ACH growth and combined instant-rail output, is covered in the ACH payments statistics pillar.