What counts as a "direct deposit" for a bank bonus

Every checking bonus says "direct deposit required." Those three words do most of the work in the offer, and the banks define them more narrowly on paper than their systems apply them in practice.

What the terms say

Three offers that are live today, in the banks' own words.

"A direct deposit of regular monthly income," such as salary, pension, or Social Security, sent by the payer using your account and routing numbers. Not counted: teller deposits, wire transfers, debit card transfers, ATM deposits, online or mobile transfers, and transfers from a bank, brokerage, or Merrill investment account.

Bank of America, $500 tiered checking offer

"An electronic deposit of your paycheck, pension or government benefits" from an employer or the government, made using your account and routing numbers. Not counted: Zelle and person-to-person payments, micro-deposits, branch or mobile check deposits, external transfers, tax refunds, dividends, retirement distributions, debit card transactions, and wires.

Chase, $400 Total Checking offer

"A regular periodic payment, such as salary, pension, government payments," arriving by ACH or Real-Time Payment credit from an employer or an outside entity. Not counted: wires, and transfers started from inside Capital One's own site or app.

Capital One, 360 Checking $250 offer

Read literally, all three say the same thing: income, from a payer, sent to your routing and account number. Read against what their systems actually accept, they say three different things.

What the bank actually sees

A direct deposit is an ACH credit. Your employer's payroll file and a transfer pushed from another institution travel on the same rail and arrive at the receiving bank as the same kind of transaction: an incoming credit carrying a handful of fields, among them the originating institution, a company or sender name, a transaction code, and a description. The bank does not call your employer. Its deposit system reads those fields and assigns a category, and the bonus logic keys off the category.

That is why the forums are full of reports that a transfer "coded as a direct deposit" at one bank and failed at the next. The classification is the bank's. It is made by software, and it depends on which institution sent the money and how the sending side labeled it. None of it is published. It is known only from what people report after the fact, bank by bank and sender by sender, and it changes when a bank updates its system.

The three outcomes

• It posts as a direct deposit. The transaction carries a direct-deposit label or category in your account activity, and it counts toward the requirement.
• It posts as a transfer. Same money, same arrival, wrong category. It does not count, the bank will not reclassify it on request, and the window keeps running.
• It never had a chance. Person-to-person payments, wires, mobile check deposits, and transfers you start from inside the receiving bank's own app are excluded by every bank's terms and never register.

Strict banks and permissive banks

Banks sit on a spectrum. Chase is the strictest major bank in 2026: its definition names the employer and the government, excludes external transfers by name, and reported results from pushes are inconsistent enough that the clean route there is a one-cycle payroll split. Bank of America and Capital One publish similar language, but reported datapoints show their systems accepting a wider range of incoming credits, which is why they are the usual places to start.

The practical consequence is that the method is per bank, not per person. What registered for you at one bank tells you nothing about the next.

If you use payroll

A payroll split is the one route every bank's terms endorse. Most payroll portals let you add a second account and send a fixed dollar amount there each pay period. It takes effect the following cycle, so submit it the day you open the account, and reverse it once the deposit has posted and counted. The cost is two portal edits and the risk of forgetting the second one. It is the right answer at a strict bank and an unnecessary chore at a permissive one.

How to tell whether it counted

• Read the transaction's description and category in the account activity. Banks that count a deposit generally label it as a direct deposit or an ACH credit from the sender. A transfer label is the warning sign.
• Check within a few days, not at the end of the window. A deposit that coded wrong early leaves time to send another. One discovered on day 85 does not.
• At tiered offers, check each slice. Bank of America's current offer pays by total qualifying deposits, so one $2,500 slice that posts as a transfer drops a $500 bonus to $300 rather than voiding it.
• At offers that require a count, confirm the count. Capital One wants two separate deposits of $500 or more. A single $1,000 push satisfies the dollars and fails the count.

What the Almanac publishes

The deposit-method matrix is a running record of what currently registers as a qualifying direct deposit at each bank in the calendar: which sender, sent how. It is re-verified weekly against reported datapoints and the banks' own pages, and each sequence in your calendar carries its bank's current entry. The flagship sequence on the front page shows the format, with the method row withheld.