SWIFT · intraday
What an MT942 reports, and what it leaves out on purpose
An MT942 lists the movements a bank has booked since its last report, above a floor limit somebody configured once and nobody looks at again. There is no opening balance in it and no closing balance either. Teams that build a position out of one find that out on the day the position is wrong.
The account every page here reads
EUR- Published by
- SWIFT
- What it carries
- Movements since the last report, above a floor limit. No balance anywhere.
- Account
- ES21 0049 0001 5323 4567 8901
Closing balance · Aug 14, 2026EUR 2,990,901.67
The definition
What an MT942 actually is
The interim transaction report of the MT9xx family: an MT940’s statement lines with the balances taken away and a timestamp put in their place.
An MT942 is the SWIFT message a bank sends to report the movements booked on an account since the previous report in the same series. :20: identifies the message, :25: names the account and :28C: gives its place in a numbered series. :34F: states the floor limit, below which nothing is reported at all. :13D: stamps the date, the time and the UTC offset the report was cut at. A :61: and :86: pair follows for every movement, in exactly the form an MT940 uses, and :90D: and :90C: close the message with the number and the sum of the debits and of the credits it carries.
- Who sends it
- Your bank, over the channel that already carries the statement — EBICS, host-to-host, SFTP. Because the movement lines are the MT940’s own, a system that already reads the statement reads this without a second parser.
- When it arrives
- Through the day, on the frequency you agree with the bank, and each report starts where the previous one stopped. That chaining is what :28C: is for: a gap in the series is a report that did not arrive, and it is the only thing that will tell you.
- What it looks like
- Plain text, one tag to a line, the tags in a fixed order. Two of the tags carry the whole difference from a statement — a floor limit at the top and a summary pair at the bottom — and the balances that would bracket an MT940 are simply not there.
What its parts are called
- MT942 :34F:
- MT942 vs MT940
- MT942 :90D: :90C:
- MT942 floor limit
- MT942 :13D:
The file
The same morning, in the SWIFT spelling
The same account and the same moment as the CAMT.052 page, reported the other way. Two movements booked, the bank’s own quarterly charges still to come after the close, and nothing anywhere in the message that says what the account holds.
:20:INTR26081400161 :25:ES2100490001532345678901 :28C:00161/00001 :34F:EUR10000,00 :13D:2608141130+0200 :61:2608150814C182046,55NTRFNONREF//BK26081401 :86:/ORDP/NORTE TESORERIA SL/REMI/FRA 4471/EREF/4471QX :61:2608140814D42318,90NDDTMD-88214//BK26081402 :86:/BENM/NORTE SUMINISTROS SL/REMI/SUMINISTRO JULIO :90D:1EUR42318,90 :90C:1EUR182046,55
Where each fact lives in this file
- Which account it is
- :25:
- The moment it is a picture of
- :13D:
- The smallest movement it reports
- :34F:
- One movement, and which way it went
- :61: · 3 · 5
- The day it was booked, and the day the money is yours
- :61: · 1 · 2
- What the bank wrote about it
- :86:
- The reference that ties it to a payment
- :61: · 8 · :86:/EREF/
- How many moved, and for how much
- :90D: · :90C:
What comes out
The lines are the statement’s. The balance is yours to keep.
Every :61: here is byte for byte the line the MT940 will carry tonight, which is the useful half. The half that costs teams money is the one that is missing.
Out of :61: we take the amount, both dates, the transaction type and the bank’s reference, exactly as on the statement, and :86: goes through the same per-bank rules. :90D: and :90C: are then a control: the count and the sum of what is above them, per direction, so a report that lost a line in transit does not foot and says so. We carry the position forward from the last closed statement and apply these movements to it, and the position states the timestamp from :13D: rather than the moment you happened to look at it.
Then the floor limit. A movement smaller than :34F: is not reported, it is not announced, and there is no field anywhere in the message that says one was left out — so a position built from these alone drifts downward all day and reconciles at the close. A floor limit of zero is a real setting and worth asking your bank for. Where the limit stays, the closed statement is what closes the gap, and the size of that gap is a number we show you rather than a rounding you discover.
- Which account it is:25:
- ES21 0049 0001 5323 4567 8901
- One movement, and which way it went:61: · 3 · 5
- EUR +182,046.55
- The day it was booked, and the day the money is yours:61: · 1 · 2
- Aug 15, 2026
- What the bank wrote about it:86:
- NORTE TESORERIA SL · FRA 4471
- The reference that ties it to a payment:61: · 8 · :86:/EREF/
- 4471QX
This message is at its best beside a statement and at its worst on its own. Send both for one day and the difference between them stops being theoretical.
Next
The balance this message does not carry
CAMT.052 is the same morning in ISO 20022, and it does state a balance — two of them. MT940 is the close these movements end up on. The rest of the MT9xx family is where the balance-only report lives.
Formats to read beside it
The same day written in four formats, side by side, is on Format library
Asked about MT942
The questions a practitioner actually types
- 01What is the floor limit in an MT942?
- :34F: is the threshold below which the bank reports nothing. A movement under it never appears in the message and nothing in the message says it existed, so a small payment can be invisible all day and turn up on the closed statement that night. The field can carry one limit for both directions or two, one marked D and one marked C. Ask your bank what yours is set to, and ask whether it can be set to zero.
- 02Does an MT942 have a balance?
- No, and that is the design rather than an omission. There is no :60F: and no :62F: anywhere in the message. The nearest thing to arithmetic in it is :90D: and :90C:, which give the number and the sum of the debits and of the credits the report carries — a control over the lines above them, not a statement of what the account holds. The balance comes from the last closed statement, moved forward.
- 03What is the difference between MT942 and MT940?
- MT940 is the closed statement: an opening balance, every movement of the period and a closing balance. MT942 is what has moved since the previous interim report, above a floor limit, with a timestamp and no balances at all. The movement lines are identical in form, so the same reader handles both, and a movement seen on an MT942 in the morning is the same movement on the MT940 that night rather than a second one.
- 04What do :90D: and :90C: mean?
- :90D: is the number of debit entries in the report and their total; :90C: is the same for the credits. Each is a count and a sum in one field, and together they are how a reader proves the message arrived whole. If the lines you parsed do not add up to what these two say, something was lost between the bank and you, and that is worth knowing before the figure reaches a screen.
Send a day of MT942 and the statement behind it.
One account, one day. You get back the intraday position at every timestamp, the movements behind it, and the exact difference between what the reports carried and what the statement closed on.
Including whatever the floor limit hid. That gap is a figure, not a shrug.