Which Bank Does Routing Number 256074974 Belong To?

Last verified against primary sources: October 11, 2026. FedACH directory effective October 9, 2026. Fedwire directory effective October 8, 2026.

256074974 belongs to Navy Federal Credit Union, Vienna, Virginia. There is exactly one record for it in the Federal Reserve Banks’ official E-Payments Routing Directory, and Navy Federal has no second routing number. But the useful part of this question is not the answer — it is the method, because the official answer lives in two databases that are updated on different days and do not always agree. Navy Federal’s own number comes back as “NAVY FEDERAL CREDIT UNION” in one and “NAVY FCU WASH” in the other. One number in Navy Federal’s own prefix 2560 comes back as two different banks in two different states.

The short answer

One number, two official answers

The directory is not one database. The Federal Reserve Banks publish two searches, maintained against two different systems, and the pages themselves stamp different effective dates on the answer.

The header itself tells you the names will not match: the Fedwire search returns a field literally called Short Name. That is not corruption — it is a separate column in a separate system, and the Fedwire record for Navy Federal is “NAVY FCU WASH.”

How to run the lookup yourself

Both searches are public, take a GET request, and can be driven by routing number, institution name, or state (with optional city). Four behaviours we confirmed by querying them directly are worth knowing before you start, because two of them will silently waste your time:

1. Two digits is the floor, and the error message is literal. Submit a single digit and the FedACH form answers: “The routing number provided is not long enough. Please enter at least the first two digits of the routing number.” The input box on the form is labelled “Whole or partial routing number (first two digits minimum).”
2. Two digits is also usually too broad. Searching 25 does not error — it refuses to answer: “There are more than 499 FedACH Participants matching your search criteria. Please make your search more specific, then try again.” There is a hard 499-result ceiling, and the same ceiling exists on the Fedwire side. In practice the shortest prefix that works is three digits.
3. The search is “starts with,” not “equals.” The results page echoes your query back as “Search Criteria: Routing number starts with 2560.” That is what makes partial numbers useful: 256 and 2560 both returned the same 22 records today.
4. Name search is “contains,” so expect neighbours. The FedACH search echoes “Search Criteria: Name contains NAVY.” Querying NAVY returns two records — Navy Federal, and 0117-3652-5 “U.S. TREASURY (SVC) NAVY CASH” in Boston, MA. Querying NAVY on the Fedwire side returns one: “NAVY FCU WASH.”

The Fed’s own landing page describes the scope in one sentence, and the sentence contains the caveat most people miss:

“The Federal Reserve Banks’ E-Payments Routing Directory provides basic routing information for Fedwire® Funds Service, Fedwire Securities Service, and FedACH® transactions. This information is synchronized with the Federal Reserve FedACH and Fedwire databases daily and is provided solely as a service to financial institutions and other authorized users to help process and settle their transactions efficiently. The information contained in the directory may not be sold, re-licensed, or otherwise used for commercial gain.” — and, in the search menu: “Search for Fedwire participants and for FedACH participant RDFIs with commercial receipt volume.”

That last phrase is the reason a perfectly valid routing number can come back empty. The public FedACH search covers participants with commercial receipt volume — not every institution that can receive an ACH credit. Absence from the directory is not proof that a number is dead.

What we found inside Navy Federal’s own prefix

Since the search matches on prefixes, the natural experiment is to widen it. We pulled every record under 2560 — the four-digit routing symbol Navy Federal shares with its neighbours — and then ran each of those numbers through the Fedwire search separately, with and without the eligibility filters.

The headline: of 22 institutions listed under 2560 in the FedACH directory, only 10 appear in the Fedwire directory at all. Sharing a prefix tells you nothing about which rails an institution sits on. Of those 10, 9 are Funds-eligible and 8 are Securities-eligible — and the two flags do not move together.

Three things fall out of that table, and none of them are visible if you only ever look up one number:

• Every single Fedwire name differs from its FedACH name. Ten out of ten. Most are obvious abbreviations (“PENTAGON FEDERAL CREDIT UNION” → “PENTAGON FCU”), which is harmless — but it means “the name on the record” is not a single fact.
• Four of the ten disagree on the city. Three are neighbouring suburbs of the same metro area. The fourth is not.
• The eligibility flags are independent. 2560-7854-3 is marked Securities-eligible but not Funds-eligible — it can be found in a securities-only query and will vanish from a funds-only one.

The one that comes back as two different banks

2560-7269-1 is the clearest demonstration of why “look it up” is not a trivial instruction. We queried it directly in both directories on the same day:

• FedACH participant search: MORGAN STANLEY PRIVATE BANK NA, Jersey City, NJ (directory effective October 9, 2026)
• Fedwire participant search: ETRADE BANK, Purchase, NY (directory effective October 8, 2026)

Same nine digits. Two institution names that are not abbreviations of each other, in two different states. We are not going to speculate about which one is “right” — both are the Fed’s own current answers, and the point is the one you should carry away: if two official sources disagree, the disagreement is in the data, not in your typing.

Why the check digit cannot name a bank

A routing number’s ninth digit is a check digit. Passing it means the number is well-formed. It does not mean an institution exists behind it. To put a number on that gap, we took one block of a hundred possible numbers — every combination of the eighth and ninth digits after 2560749 — and ran both filters.

So arithmetic takes you from 100 candidates to 10, and only the directory takes you the rest of the way. Eight of the ten arithmetically valid numbers in Navy Federal’s own neighbourhood have no institution behind them at all.

This matters most in exactly the situation people actually face. If a landlord, a buyer or a payroll department sends you a nine-digit number and claims it is Navy Federal’s, the check digit will not catch a lie — it will happily validate a number that nobody owns. 256074961 sits seven digits deep into a match with Navy Federal’s number, passes the check digit, is a real institution, and is not Navy Federal. Only the directory settles it.

We deliberately do not republish the check-digit formula here — it is already documented on this site, and knowing it is not what decides the question. See what happens when a routing number is wrong, including the transposition the formula misses.

What the directory will never tell you

Even a clean, unambiguous hit returns four fields: routing number, name, city, state. That is the whole payload. It does not tell you:

• Whether the institution is a bank or a credit union. Navy Federal happens to say so in its name. Nothing in the record states it.
• Whether it is a bank you can walk into. The city is an office address in the record, not a branch near the recipient.
• Whether the number is still being issued. Routing numbers are retired and reassigned over time, and the registrar for ABA numbers is a private firm rather than the Fed — see when a routing number is wrong. A number that resolves today can be withdrawn later, which is why both directories print an effective date on every page.
• Anything about the account. A routing number identifies an institution. The account number is the part that identifies you. Navy Federal’s own direct deposit form says as much — see account number vs. access number.
• Whether a given transfer will settle. Being a FedACH participant is not the same as accepting your particular transaction.

Look up any routing number

This page cannot query the Fed’s database for you — the directory is a Federal Reserve application, not an open API, and its terms prohibit commercial reuse. What this does instead is the part that usually goes wrong: it checks the number is well-formed, and hands you the two official searches with your number already filled in.

What we could not verify

• Which Fedwire service Navy Federal actually settles through. The directory marks 256074974 as both Funds-eligible and Securities-eligible. We report the flags as returned; we did not find any Federal Reserve or Navy Federal page describing what Navy Federal uses them for.
• Why 2560-7269-1 carries two different names. Both are live official records. The Fed publishes no reconciliation between the two directories, and we will not guess at a merger or a rename.
• The directory’s FAQ and field-definition pages. They sit behind a click-through terms-of-use gate that returns the same page for every path we tried, so no field-level definitions from those pages are quoted here. The quotes in this article come from the search forms, the results pages and the public landing page.
• Anything from aba.com. The American Bankers Association site returns 403 to automated requests, so no ABA policy text appears here.
• Numbers outside the two Fed directories. Everything above was measured today against those two databases. A routing number that exists in neither is outside what this method can settle.

Sources

• Federal Reserve Banks, E-Payments Routing Directory (scope, daily synchronization, terms): frbservices.org
• FedACH Participant RDFI search (effective October 9, 2026): app.frbservices.org
• Fedwire Participant search (effective October 8, 2026): app.frbservices.org
• Navy Federal wire transfer instructions (routing number 256074974, SWIFT/BIC NFCUUS33XXX, 820 Follin Lane SE, Vienna, VA 22180, 6:30 p.m. ET incoming): navyfederal.org
• Related on this site: what the first two digits mean · when a routing number is wrong · Navy Federal vs. PenFed vs. USAA