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Fedwire is the Federal Reserve’s real-time gross settlement network: each wire settles individually, in central bank money, and is final on settlement. Use it for high-value or time-critical USD payments. This page covers domestic wires between US bank accounts. For international USD wires over the correspondent network, see SWIFT.

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What Augustus supports

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Sending wires

Create a payout with currency: "USD", rail: "fedwire", and an aba counterparty financial address:
2026-05-01
POST /v1/payouts in the API Reference → The aba financial address: A settled wire cannot be recalled, so verify the beneficiary details before sending.

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Valid characters

Names, addresses, and the remittance text travel in the wire message, which allows the characters A–Z a–z 0–9 / - ? : ( ) . , ' + and space. Text containing other characters is sanitized before sending.

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Operating hours and cut-offs

Submit payouts 24/7; a payout is sent as soon as it is created, and wires cannot be future-dated. Wires instructed before 6:45 PM US Eastern on a Fedwire day settle the same day; later instructions queue and settle when Fedwire next opens. Fedwire opens at 9:00 PM US Eastern the evening before each banking day and closes at 7:00 PM US Eastern. It is closed on weekends and Federal Reserve holidays. Within operating hours, settlement on the Fed takes seconds; when the beneficiary sees the funds depends on their own bank, usually under a minute, sometimes hours. For example:
  • A wire created on a Tuesday at 4:00 PM Eastern settles within minutes.
  • A wire created on a Tuesday at 7:15 PM has missed the 6:45 PM cut-off. It queues and settles when Fedwire reopens at 9:00 PM that evening, as a Wednesday payment.
  • A wire created on a Friday at 7:30 PM, or any time on the weekend, queues until Fedwire reopens on Sunday at 9:00 PM Eastern and settles then, as a Monday payment.

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Limits

Fedwire has no network limit on the size of a wire. Account-level limits are agreed per customer at onboarding; there is no fixed platform limit beyond that.

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Status and lifecycle

A wire payout moves through the standard payout statuses:
  1. Created: status initiated, payout.initiated fires. A wire instructed outside operating hours stays initiated in the queue.
  2. Submitted to Fedwire: status submitted, payout.submitted fires.
  3. Settled on the Fed: status sent, payout.sent fires.
  4. Rejected before submission, for example by validation or screening: status failed, payout.failed fires.

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Finality and cancellation

A settled wire is final: there is no return window on the network, and recovering funds is a request the receiving bank is free to refuse. If it agrees, the funds usually arrive as a new incoming wire — a new deposit, with the original payout staying sent. A return that references the original payment (a pacs.004 quoting the UETR) instead moves the payout to returned. Cancellation is not possible through the API. Before a wire is submitted to Fedwire, support may be able to stop it; after settlement, only a voluntary return by the receiving bank remains.

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Receiving wires

Senders address your account with its US routing and account number, available on the account’s financial_addresses via API or the dashboard.
  • Incoming wires appear as deposits with rail: "fedwire".
  • deposit.settled fires when the wire arrives; wire funds are final and immediately available.
  • The sender’s bank details are referenced through the deposit’s counterparty_id.
  • Wires that cannot be applied to any account are returned to the sending bank.
  • If a sending bank requests a wire to be returned, Augustus asks you first; a Fedwire payment is never reversed without your consent.
For payments from senders outside the US, see Receive USD internationally.

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Out of scope today

  • Requesting the return of a wire you have sent is not supported through the API or Dashboard. Contact support, and Augustus contacts the receiving bank.
  • Drawdown requests are not supported: asking another bank to pull funds out of its account via Fedwire, or honoring such a request against your account.