When a bank invokes one of the Regulation CC exceptions to delay a deposit, federal law does not leave the depositor guessing. Paragraph (g) of the funds-availability rule requires a written notice, and that notice has to carry five defined pieces of information. A notice missing the amount, the reason or the release period is an incomplete notice on the regulation’s own terms.
The rule belongs to the Federal Reserve’s Regulation CC and is codified at 12 CFR 229.13. It governs the paperwork around holds that fall outside the standard availability schedules, which is where most disputes between depositors and banks begin.
The five items paragraph (g) puts on every notice
The text of section 229.13 says the written notice must include:
- the customer’s account number or identifying code;
- the date of the deposit;
- the amount of the deposit that is being delayed;
- the reason the exception was invoked; and
- “the time period within which the funds will be available for withdrawal.”
Read together, the five items answer the questions a depositor would ask in order: which account, which deposit, how much is held, why, and until when. The fourth and fifth are the ones that matter most in practice. A stated reason lets the depositor check the hold against the exception the bank is relying on, and a stated period turns an open-ended delay into a date that can be put on a calendar.
Why the amount line can differ from the deposit
The third item speaks of “the amount of the deposit that is being delayed,” not the full deposit. That phrasing matters because some exceptions hold only part of what was deposited. The same section sets a $6,725 figure for the large-deposit exception, which applies where the aggregate deposited on any one banking day is in excess of $6,725, and the same figure for the new-account exception, which refers to the first $6,725 of funds deposited on any one banking day.
Take a hypothetical household that deposits a $9,000 check. The notice would be expected to say how much of that sum is held and when the held portion becomes available, rather than treating the entire check as frozen. If the amount line simply repeats the full deposit without explanation, that is a reasonable point to raise with the bank in writing.
When the notice must arrive
Timing has two branches. The notice is to be given to the depositor “at the time of the deposit.” The default carves out a deposit that is not made in person to a bank employee, and a decision to invoke an exception based on facts that only become known after the deposit. For those cases, the bank must mail or deliver the notice “as soon as practicable, but no later than the first business day following the day the facts become known.”
The deadline therefore runs from when the bank learns the relevant facts, not from the date of the deposit. A depositor who sees a hold on the account activity but has received no notice can compare the date the hold appeared with the date a notice was mailed or delivered.
Which exceptions trigger the notice
Section 229.13 collects the exceptions that let a bank go past the standard schedules. Among them are the new-account exception, with a maximum hold stated as the ninth business day after the day of deposit; the large-deposit exception; and the repeated-overdraft exception, which applies where an account has been negative on six or more banking days in six months, or by $6,725 or more on two or more banking days in that period. Each of those is a reason a bank might cite on the notice.
The remaining exceptions in the section cover situations the dollar tests do not. An account counts as new for the first 30 calendar days after it is established. A check that was returned unpaid and then redeposited falls under another exception, with carve-outs where the return was for a missing indorsement or a postdated date that has since been remedied. A bank that has reasonable cause to believe a check is uncollectible from the paying bank may also delay it, and emergency conditions such as an interruption of communications or the suspension of payments by another bank are covered as well.
The standard schedules that these exceptions displace are set out in section 229.12, which includes the $550 cash-availability rule and refers to the $275 next-day amount under section 229.10(c)(1)(vii). When a hold applies to funds that the standard schedule would have released, the notice is the document that explains the departure.
Reading the notice against the regulation
The eCFR version of section 229.13 read for this article showed a currency date of September 25, 2026 and a last-amended date of September 14, 2026. A practical check takes the five items from the paragraph (g) list and ticks them off against the paper or electronic notice in hand: account, date, amount, reason and period. A notice that supplies all five has met the content requirement; one that omits any of them has not, whatever else it says.
Matching a hold notice to the deposit slip
A hold notice that arrives with a date, an amount and a release period is useful only when it can be set beside what actually posted to the account. Any mismatch between the notice and the account activity is something to raise with the bank in writing, and a dated record makes that conversation easier to have.
The Bank Account & Debt Protection Kit is a 10-page guide whose contents include the 2-month bank protection rule and a protected-funds and dispute log for lining notices up against dates and amounts.
Compare each notice’s five items with a protected-funds and dispute log →
AI assistance was used in drafting this explainer; the five items and timing rules were read from the eCFR text of 12 CFR 229.13.
