On July 1, 2025, the dollar figures inside the federal check-hold rules went up. What did not move was the machinery around them. Regulation CC still runs on an availability schedule that has been in place since 1990, and it still works the same way it always has: a small slice of a check deposit has to be released almost immediately, the rest follows a fixed timetable, and a short list of exceptions lets a bank suspend both.
Most depositors know only the first part, and usually only as a vague sense that some of the money should show up fast. The rest of the rule is where the useful detail lives, including a fee refund that a bank has to tell you about but that very few customers ever claim.
What the inflation adjustment moved, and what it left alone
The Federal Reserve Board and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau set a formal methodology in 2019 for adjusting Regulation CC’s dollar amounts every five years. The most recent adjustment ran on a 21.8 percent increase in the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers between July 2018 and July 2023. The rule was issued May 13, 2024, published in the Federal Register on May 20, 2024 at 89 FR 43737, and took effect July 1, 2025 for five years.
Five figures changed. The minimum next-day amount rose from $225 to $275. The cash withdrawal amount rose from $450 to $550. The new-account amount, the large-deposit threshold and the repeatedly-overdrawn threshold all rose together from $5,525 to $6,725. Civil liability in an individual action moved from a $100-to-$1,100 range to $125 to $1,350, and the maximum in a class action rose from $552,500 to $672,950. Those are the figures the agencies published in the threshold adjustment, and they hold until the next five-year cycle.
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What the $275 rule actually says
The wording matters, because the common assumption is that $275 attaches to each check. It does not. Under 12 CFR 229.10(c)(1)(vii), a depositary bank must make available for withdrawal by the next business day the lesser of $275, or the total amount deposited on any one banking day to all of the customer’s accounts by checks that are not already entitled to next-day availability under the paragraphs above it.
So a $3,000 check produces $275 the next business day. A $150 check produces $150, because $150 is the lesser figure. Three checks totaling $1,200 deposited on the same banking day produce $275 in total, not $825, because the rule aggregates across the banking day and across the customer’s accounts.
The deposits that skip the $275 rule entirely
Before the $275 floor applies, six categories of check get full next-business-day availability on the whole amount. A U.S. Treasury check deposited into an account held by a payee qualifies. So do a U.S. Postal Service money order and a check drawn on a Federal Reserve Bank or Federal Home Loan Bank, when deposited in person to a bank employee and into a payee’s account. A check drawn by a state or a unit of local government qualifies when it is deposited in person, into a payee’s account, at a bank located in the same state as the issuer. A cashier’s, certified or teller’s check qualifies when deposited in person into a payee’s account. And a check drawn on the same bank qualifies when both branches sit in the same state or the same check processing region.
Two of those categories carry a condition worth knowing. For state and local government checks and for cashier’s, certified and teller’s checks, a bank may require a special deposit slip or envelope identifying the check type. If it does, it must either hand the customer the slip or explain how to obtain one and keep it reasonably available. Cash deposited in person and electronic payments, including direct deposit, are governed separately and are already next-day.
When the rest of the money shows up
The balance of a check follows the availability schedule in 12 CFR 229.12: the second business day after the banking day of deposit for a local check, the fifth business day for a nonlocal check, and the fifth business day for anything deposited at a nonproprietary ATM, meaning a machine the bank does not own or operate. Deposits made at branches in Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands may be extended by one business day when the check is drawn on an out-of-state paying bank.
Section 229.12(d) contains the provision behind the $550 figure, and it is a genuine consumer protection rather than a limitation. A bank may push out by one business day the point at which deposited funds are available for withdrawal in cash. If it does, it must still make $550 of those funds available in cash by 5:00 p.m. on the day the funds would otherwise have become available. The regulation states expressly that this $550 is in addition to the $275 released under the next-day rule.
The exceptions that suspend the schedule
A list of exceptions in 12 CFR 229.13 turns the schedule off, and the ones a household is most likely to meet are new accounts, large deposits, redeposited checks and reasonable cause to doubt collectibility. During the first 30 calendar days of a new account, the $275 rule and the ordinary availability schedule do not apply at all; only the first $6,725 of the special check categories gets next-day treatment, and anything above that can be held until the ninth business day. Cash and electronic payments still clear the next day. An account is not treated as new if every customer on it has held another account at that bank for at least 30 days.
Under the large-deposit exception, the schedule does not apply to the portion of check deposits above $6,725 on any one banking day, and a bank may aggregate across all of a customer’s accounts to reach that figure. A check that was deposited, returned and deposited again falls outside the schedule as well. The most consequential exception is reasonable cause to doubt collectibility, and it is deliberately hard to invoke. The regulation requires facts that would produce a well-grounded belief in the mind of a reasonable person, and it states that such a belief may not rest on the check being of a particular class or on the depositor belonging to a particular class of persons.
The fee refund most depositors never ask for
Whenever a bank invokes one of those exceptions, section 229.13(g) requires it to give the depositor a notice, and section 229.13(e)(2) attaches a real consequence to skipping it. A bank that delays funds for reasonable cause and does not furnish written notice at the time of deposit may not assess any overdraft or returned-check fee that would not have occurred but for the delay, provided the deposited check was ultimately paid by the paying bank.
A bank can preserve its right to charge, but only by including a fee notice with the exception notice, and that notice has to state that the customer may be entitled to a refund of overdraft or returned-check fees and explain how to obtain one. That instruction is printed in the regulation itself. It means a depositor who was charged after a hold, on a check that eventually cleared, is reading a document that is required to tell them how to get the money back.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
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