I deposited a check in my credit union savings account. The check is legitimate but the issuing company is a little weird, and I’m afraid that at some point they might tell their bank that the check is improper or something (I’d just as soon not go into details on that point). With that in mind, how long should I wait to be safe spending that money, being sure that they can’t claw those funds (or any part of them) back through ordinary banking methods, i.e. without separate legal action like a lawsuit. I hope this question is clear and fairly straightforward. If it matters, this all happened in California, where I live, and where this company is based.
AIUI, as long as the check wasn’t fraudulent, or the bank hasn’t made a mistake processing it, once the funds are made available the issuer cannot cancel the check and take the money back.
Based on this reasoning, there is no reason to wait once the funds become available to you UNLESS you believe the check is fraudulent or the bank has made some kind of mistake.
I should mention that the issuer can still sue you if the check they sent was for more than they owed you, but that has nothing to do with the bank.
In my experience this is absolutely not true. My bank (one of the biggest banks in the country) have made funds available to me and then come back weeks later to say that the check was no good and I had to clear an overdraft.
We use Telecheck at work and it still happens, though very rarely nowadays. Usually it is because the check was a forgery or stolen. Either the scammers printed up checks with the account information from a valid account, stole a box of checks or “washed” a check.
Why is this my problem and not the bank’s?
As our Treasury department (our company’s not the country’s) has posted on their wall. “Banking regulations can be summarized in two words: Bank Wins”
You would think that in 2025, your bank you send a request to the writer’s bank along with a digitized copy of the check. Clearing a check can be run as an overnight batch so 24 or maybe 48 hours. The fact that you receive credit to your funds in two business days seems to confirm that. Well, you’d be wrong. Just to show how out of date the system is, it wasn’t until new banking laws in 2004 that it wasn’t a requirement to have checks physically transferred between banks. That’s why check fraudsters deposited checks on one coast and “their bank” was located on the other coast.
Today the check goes through one of many clearinghouses run by the Federal Reserve. Here is the process:
You write a check from your US Bank account for $100 to Annie
Annie deposits the check into BofA. BofA credits her account $100
BofA sends your physical check to its district’s Federal Reserve along with all of the other checks deposited that day.
The Federal Reserve credits BofA $100 when it processes it.
That district’s Federal Reserve sorts all of the checks in the clearinghouse (remember we are in Annie’s district) and sends your check to your district’s Federal Reserve. Or keeps it if your and Annie’s banks are in the same district.
Your district’s Federal Reserve debits US Bank $100. It then sends either the physical check or a digital copy to your bank. Notice it doesn’t get digitized until the end so despite the changes in 2004, they are still moving the physical check around most of the way. Would it be quicker if the check were digitized at the beginning? Sure. But like I said, it is an antiquated system.
US Bank debits your account $100. This is the point that the check has cleared. IF you cannot cover the check, it has not cleared and that is a whole other post.
And if I’m not mistaken, the clearinghouse only works business days and excludes federal holidays.
To answer the OP, there is no clear cut answer but I have heard 2 weeks or 3 to be sure.
Sounds like a really good question to ask your credit union. 
You wouldn’t have to mention your specific case/circumstances, you could call with a seemingly random “the other day I got to wondering…” general inquiry.
Thank you, this is exactly the information I was looking for. And, to summarize the salient point, there is no way for me to know when or if the payor’s bank has debited the payor’s account for my check, is that correct?
That is also a good point.
Correct. Your bank doesn’t know as there is no confirmation that the process is done AFAIK. Some people think that if their bank verify funds, the check will clear. Given the length of time taken to clear, those funds can long have been spent by the time their account is debited.
A friend once had a check in USD that he asked me to change since I had a USD account at a bank in Boston. Although it claimed to be a cashier’s check, my friend told me he had some reason to believe it was bogus. So I mailed it off to my bank along with a note explaining the circumstance. It was at least a month later that the check came back as uncollectible.
I once read about a scam that involved a check that had a west coast clearance number printed in metallic ink and an east coast bank’s name on it. The check spent about 6 months going from coast to coast and back before the paper started wearing out and a human noticed the discrepancy. Meantime, the scammer had taken the money and ran.
True. For a non-fraudulent check that is later stop-paymented, a couple weeks is 99.9% sure enough time for the discrepancy to come back to haunt the depositor. Less time if the banks are big and/or local to each other. More time if both are Bank of Podunks from different Podunks at opposite ends of the country.
If the check itself is fraudulent and was from the git-go, there’s almost no time limit to when that problem comes back to bite the depositor. However long it takes the whole banking system to figure out the check is fake, that’s how long before the bank(s) get their money back. From the innocent depositor.
This hasn’t been the case for quite a while.
Since the passage of Check 21 in 2004, almost all banks now exchange information electronically, including digital images of the paper checks. The clearing process still goes through the Fed system, but it’s all electronic. The paper checks are stored at the bank of first deposit for, I believe, five years.
AIUI this is akin to any stolen good.
Let’s say you walk into a store and buy a new TV for $500. You have every reason to think the transaction is legal. Maybe the store does too. But, it turns out, the TV was stolen and sold to the store who sold it to you.
The police will confiscate your TV and give it back to the original owner. It does not matter if you and the seller were 100% unaware of the fraud and had every reason to believe it was a legit transaction.
They will tell you it is up to you to sue those responsible to get your money back.
(This happened to my parents long ago when they bought a car. My parents were about as law abiding citizens as you could ever meet and my dad was an attorney…still got wrapped up in this…ended ok for them when done.)
Our firm, and me personally, take a photo of each check on our cell phone for depositing. The bank never gets the physical check. I have a drawer full of them, although I think they only advise keeping for a month.
FWIW, the Washington Bar Association requires us to hold funds in our trust account for 10 days before distribution to our clients if the money came in via check. Turns out that unlike the old days, we can no longer call the bank to verify the check has cleared. We prefer wire transfers because clients don’t like to wait 10 days. (at least it’s 10 calendar days, not business days)
My source said that the writers bank could request the paper copy from their Federal Reserve. I assumed that meant the Federal Reserve kept it. I assumed then that if a bank requests the paper check, that request gets sent to the depositor’s bank? Or was my source wrong on that step?
Correct. Most banks have this capability.
You can get a printed digital image from the Fed, which is known as a ‘substitute check’. I’m not sure if this is what your source meant, but I don’t think the original paper check will ever leave the bank of first deposit. (I might be wrong on that step; it’s been 9 years since I worked at the bank from which I retired.)