# Account Balance
source: https://developer.mastercard.com/open-finance-us/documentation/products/pay/account-balance/index.md

The Account Balance service provides real-time or cached bank account balance information from your customer's Financial Institution (FI). The information returned includes:

* Available balance---the amount of money that the account holder can spend or withdraw immediately. This value reflects some pending transactions (for example, a pending debit card transaction).
* Cleared balance---the amount of money currently in the account. This may vary from the available balance as it does not account for pending transactions.

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The available and cleared balance will be the same if there are no pending transactions or funds to clear. However, if there is, for example, a pending debit card transaction of $50, the available balance will be $50 lower than the cleared balance.

For both fraud prevention and managing insufficient funds (NSF), we recommend you rely on the available balance. This value provides a more accurate view of funds by factoring in pending debit transactions or holds, which the cleared balance does not include.
Tip: To leverage the **Get Available Balance** solution, enrollment to this service is required. Please contact your account manager to learn more. Note: The **Get Available Balance** endpoint is a premium service, and is billable for each successful API call.

## Use Cases {#use-cases}

* **Payments** - Evaluate a customer's ability to make a payment.
* **Financial Aggregation Tools** - Provides up-to-date account balance information that can be consolidated and displayed to the customer.

## How It Works {#how-it-works}

1. Generate the required credentials to call the API. See [Generate Your Credentials](https://developer.mastercard.com/open-finance-us/documentation/quick-start-guide/index.md#generate-your-credentials) in the Quick Start Guide.
2. Generate an Access Token. See [Create Access Token](https://developer.mastercard.com/open-finance-us/documentation/quick-start-guide/index.md#step-1---create-access-token) in the Quick Start Guide.
3. Create [a customer](https://developer.mastercard.com/open-finance-us/documentation/quick-start-guide/index.md#welcome-your-first-customer) and link them to at least one account via [Mastercard Data Connect](https://developer.mastercard.com/open-finance-us/documentation/connect/generate-2-connect-url-apis/index.md). You can use any of the [Bank Account Profiles](https://developer.mastercard.com/open-finance-us/documentation/integration-and-testing/test-the-apis/index.md#bank-account-profiles) to test.
4. Call [Get Available Balance](https://developer.mastercard.com/open-finance-us/documentation/api-reference/index.md#GetAvailableBalanceLive) with the optional query parameter `?balance_cache_interval=30`. The value for this query parameter must be between 1 and 1440 minutes (1440 minutes is 24 hours) and is used to check if there is an existing cached balance within this timeframe. If no suitable cached balance exists, the Financial Institution will be called to return a live balance. For example, if you specify 15 minutes, cached data is returned only if the data was cached in the last 15 minutes.

### Get Available Balance {#get-available-balance}

Retrieve the available and cleared account balances for a single account in real-time from an FI, using `customerId` and `accountId` in the request parameters. You can use this endpoint to retrieve either a live or cached balance from an FI.
Alert: The default caching behavior of this endpoint will change on **30 June 2026**.

* **Currently** : if `balance_cache_interval` is not specified, it defaults to 0 (a live balance is retrieved).

* **From 30 June 2026** : if `balance_cache_interval` is not specified, it defaults to 30 minutes
  (a cached balance is returned).

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**Action required** :  

If you want to maintain the current behavior, update your application
to explicitly request `balance_cache_interval=0` before 30 June 2026.

API Reference: `GET /aggregation/v1/customers/{customerId}/accounts/{accountId}/availableBalance/live`

Tip: For the best performance, use the `balance_cache_interval` query parameter in your API call. This avoids making too many requests to the FI to obtain a live balance. We recommend a 30-minute interval, but you can adjust this based on your specific needs. Diagram account-balance