Real-Time Payments are now live on Unit

Money in the U.S. still moves on a banking calendar. ACH settles on business days and wires stop at the end of them. In 2026, that leaves 114 days when neither settles at all: 104 weekend days and 10 Federal Reserve holidays. That's nearly one day in three.

Your customers don't keep that calendar. A business remembers a supplier invoice at 7pm on a Friday, and on ACH that payment won't land until the next business day. A customer pays them on Saturday, and the funds won't be usable until the next business day either. Seven times this year, a holiday stretches that wait across a three-day weekend.

Starting today, you can send and receive Real-Time Payments (RTP) on Unit in seconds, 24/7/365, including weekends and holidays. The supplier is paid Friday night. The Saturday payment arrives in seconds and can be used right away. 

We connect directly to The Clearing House, with no intermediary processor. RTP runs on the same Payments API, native ledger, and dashboard as ACH, wire, check, and international payments. If you're already on Unit, you can access this new rail from the same Platform you use today.

Real-Time Payments on Unit includes:

• Send and receive into the accounts your customers already hold with you. Incoming credits are final under network rules*, so funds are usable on arrival.
• A pre-send check that the recipient's bank can receive RTP, so your code can choose the rail itself 
• The network's rejection codes and transaction ID on every payment 
• A TimedOut status for payments that don't resolve
• tags to carry your order or invoice ID onto the transaction, and idempotent retries that never create a duplicate payment
• Sender account details on incoming payments

curl -X POST 'https://api.s.unit.sh/payments' \
-H 'Content-Type: application/vnd.api+json' \
-H "Authorization: Bearer ${TOKEN}" \
--data-raw '{
  "data": {
    "type": "realtimePayment",
    "attributes": {
      "amount": 500000,
      "direction": "Credit",
      "counterparty": {
        "routingNumber": "812345673",
        "accountNumber": "12345569",
        "accountType": "Checking",
        "name": "Acme Corporation"
      },
      "description": "Realtime Payment"
    },
    "relationships": {
      "account": {
        "data": {
          "type": "account",
          "id": "555"
        }
      }
    }
  }
}'

Every rail, one ledger

Because RTP sits alongside every other rail on Unit, you can combine them in a single build:

• Pay a seller over RTP the moment an order is confirmed, with the order ID already on the ledger entry
• Check whether a recipient's bank is on RTP and fall back to ACH automatically when it isn't
• Receive an RTP payment into a customer's account on a Sunday and let them spend it on their Unit card minutes later 
• Take funding by RTP on Saturday and pay a vendor by wire on Monday, from one balance

Read the docs to learn more, or talk to our team.

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Unit is a financial technology company and not a bank. Banking services are provided by Unit's bank partners, Members FDIC.

*As with other payment rails, received RTP payments can be returned after settlement in limited circumstances. See Unit’s docs for more information.