Send Money

Initiate payouts directly from your systems via Mercury's API across ACH, check, domestic wire, and international wire.

For working code, see these recipes:

• Send an ACH payment
• Request a payment approval
• Invite a recipient

For every field and response, see the Accounts, Recipients, and Send Money Requests API reference.

What You Can Build

• Automate Payouts: Trigger ACH, wire, or check payments automatically as soon as a bill is approved in your AP system.
• Gate Disbursements: Queue transactions via API for manual review and sign-off inside the Mercury dashboard prior to release of funds.
• Pay at Scale: Send payments to many recipients from a single background job or scheduled worker, looping through your recipient list.

Capabilities

• Supported: Mercury handles it.
• Client-Side: The endpoints exist and the logic runs in your code.
• Not Available Today: There is no API route for this today. Please submit feedback on ways we can improve to [email protected].

Recipients

Send Money

Approvals and Tracking

Events

Subscribe to webhooks to follow payouts as they move, and poll for status when you need it. See Webhooks to set up delivery.

Approval requests and transactions are tracked in different ways:

• Approval request (no webhook): While a payment sits in pendingApproval, poll GET /request-send-money/{requestId} to follow it.
• Transaction (webhooks): Once the request is approved it becomes a transaction, and the transaction.created and transaction.updated events apply from that point.

Internal Transfers

Before You Start

Choose a Send Path

There are two ways to send money, each with its own account-level endpoint.

A couple of things to keep in mind when you choose:

• No fixed IP address? Use requestSendMoney. It relies on dashboard approval instead of an IP allowlist, so there is no allowlist to maintain.
• International wires go through requestSendMoney only, not direct send. Set up the recipient with a recipient invite or in the dashboard first, then send with paymentMethod: internationalWire and a purpose.

Refer to Send an ACH payment for direct routing, or Request a payment approval for gated workflows.

Common Workflows

Best practices for paying many recipients at once and for tracking a payment through to completion.

Pay Many Recipients

• One Payment Per Request: Send one payment request per recipient using a client-side loop when paying multiple recipients. Send them sequentially rather than in parallel, and back off if a request fails.
• Give Each Payment Its Own idempotencyKey: Record each payment's status immediately, so a restarted loop knows what already went out and never re-sends a finished payment.
• Respect the 24-Hour Duplicate Guard on createTransaction: By default, sending the same recipient, account, amount, and payment method again within 24 hours returns 400, even with a different idempotencyKey.

Track a Payment

Standard Transactions

Track a sent payment two ways:

• Webhooks (event-driven): Subscribe to transaction.created and transaction.updated for status changes. See Webhooks.
• Polling: Query GET /account/{accountId}/transaction/{transactionId} on your own schedule.

Status: Successful payments move from pending to sent. Otherwise they land on cancelled, failed, reversed, or blocked.

Approval-Based Payments (requestSendMoney)

A queued request is not a transaction until it clears approval.

1. Track the Request: Poll GET /request-send-money/{requestId} (or GET /request-send-money to list open requests) and read status.
2. On Approval: When status moves from pendingApproval to approved, the request becomes a transaction. Track it with the standard methods above.

Objects and Endpoints

Parameters and response schemas are in Accounts, Recipients, and Send Money Requests. For the base URL and the auth header, see Getting Started.