The Federal Reserve Board confirmed on October 9, 2025 that Fedwire Funds Service will expand to 22 hours per day, six days per week, adding Sundays and US weekday holidays to the current Monday-through-Friday schedule. Implementation is targeted for 2028 or 2029. The Reserve Banks plan to narrow that window based on industry readiness assessments, with the goal of providing sufficient advance notice to all participants.
Under the expanded schedule, Fedwire will maintain its existing daily cycle of 21:00 ET to 19:00 ET but extend it across six days instead of five. The National Settlement Service will operate 21.5 hours per day on the same schedule, closing 30 minutes before Fedwire each day. Participation in the expanded operating days will be voluntary, mirroring the approach the Federal Reserve used when it extended Fedwire hours in the late 1990s.
The expansion addresses a structural limitation in global USD settlement. Fedwire's current five-day schedule creates periods when settlement in central bank money is unavailable. Banks in Asia-Pacific and Middle Eastern time zones must manage intraday USD liquidity positions without access to real-time Federal Reserve settlement at the start of their business week. The addition of Sunday operations directly targets this gap, covering the period when significant USD payment flows originate in Asian markets but Fedwire has historically been offline.
This follows a broader trend among G7 central banks. The European Central Bank opened a public consultation in June 2025 on extending T2 operating hours toward round-the-clock availability. The Bank of England confirmed in March 2026 that CHAPS will extend its settlement window to begin at 1:30 AM starting in 2027. The Federal Reserve's 2028-2029 timeline means the United States will be among the last major economies to achieve near-continuous large-value settlement, though Fedwire's scale, averaging 869,187 transactions worth $4.59 trillion daily in 2025, makes the operational challenge proportionally larger than what the ECB or Bank of England face.
For CHIPS, which settles its daily net positions through Fedwire, the expanded availability opens a technical path for The Clearing House to consider extending its own operating window beyond the current 09:00 to 18:00 ET weekday schedule. CHIPS processed record volumes in 2025, with year-to-date growth exceeding 10 percent and November 2025 reaching a monthly average of 693,000 payments per day, the highest on record. Additional Fedwire operating days could enable CHIPS to reduce the weekend settlement gap for cross-border USD payments that currently queue from Friday evening through Monday morning.
The Federal Reserve has indicated the 22x6 schedule is an intermediate step. The October 2025 announcement stated that Reserve Banks may expand to 22x7x365 operations no sooner than two years after implementing 22x6, which places potential full seven-day settlement in the 2030 or 2031 timeframe. This incremental approach contrasts with FedNow, which launched in July 2023 with 24x7x365 availability from day one, reflecting the different operational complexity and systemic risk profile of large-value versus instant payment settlement.
Financial institutions that rely on Fedwire for time-sensitive cross-border settlement, securities financing, and treasury operations will need to extend internal payment processing, compliance monitoring, and staffing models to cover Sunday and holiday operations well before the go-live date. The Federal Reserve plans to continue providing implementation updates as the timeline firms up.