A $10 Million Same-Day ACH Limit Could Be a B2B and Treasury Boon

Already a key growth area for same-day automated clearing house transactions, business-to-business and corporate-treasury payments could be set up for even more growth with Monday’s announcement of a new $10-million transaction cap set to take effect Sept. 17.

Announced by Nacha, the ACH rulemaking body, the new cap is 10 times greater than the previous limit of $1 million, which was set in 2022.  That was an increase from the $100,000 cap set in 2020 and the initial limit of $25,000 on the transaction type’s launch in 2016.

Same-day ACH volume has steadily grown, especially with the 2017 addition of same-day ACH debit payments. Total same-day ACH volume has ballooned from 13 million in 2016 to 1.4 billion in 2025. Same-day ACH debit payments comprised 56.6% of the total 2025 volume and credit 43.4%. Nacha says business-to-business ACH payments, with volume reaching 2.1 billion transactions in the 2026 first quarter, were up 9.4% from 1.9 billion a year ago.

A Nacha spokesperson says ACH network users have been asking for a higher limit. “Raising the same-day ACH limit to $10 million will enable higher-value payments to settle within the same banking day,” the spokesperson says. “Nacha anticipates the new $10-million limit will enhance same-day ACH use cases for invoice and tax payments, insurance-claim payments, payroll funding, merchant settlement, and cash concentration, among other uses.”

That should be well received by ACH users, says Ben Danner, senior analyst at Javelin Strategy & Research, a payments advisory firm, especially as customers noted that real-time payments networks FedNow from the Federal Reserve and RTP from The Clearing House Payments Co. LLC each raised its per-transaction limit in 2025 to $10 million.

“Same-day ACH was at a disadvantage to RTP and FedNow with its cap limitations and if you think about ACH use cases, increasing the cap makes sense from a competitive standpoint,” Danner says. “ACH is cheaper than instant payments, so there is also a competitive advantage on pricing, especially where a business might want a quick payment, but not necessarily instant.”

There’s likely room for all three faster payment options, says Robin LoGiudice, strategic advisor for commercial banking and payments at Datos Insights. “This increase gives banks and their customers more options to move money faster. I do not see this as a threat to RTP and FedNow adoption, as the use cases for these rails are different than those for ACH and same-day ACH,” LoGiudice says.

ACH also may be attractive from a risk perspective with some organizations, Danner suggests. “From a risk perspective, ACH payments are revocable and reversible where instant payments are generally not, so that’s also a nice risk balance for organizations. Put another way, the value prop for same-day ACH is strong as it balances cost, urgency, and risk.”