When the 120 days are up

Day 120 is not a payment date. In the accounts collected here, the day the hold was supposed to end was followed by one of four things: a deposit, a new and later date, a release that never reached a bank account, or nothing at all. This page is what merchants who reached that day wrote down on the day they reached it.

The general file on this company — how holds start, who imposes them, what the agreement says about reserves — is the Shopify Payments file. This page picks up where that one ends: at the date you were given. Where that date comes from, and every other length the company has stated in public, is set out in how long a Shopify payouts hold is meant to be.

2. The date can move after it passes

Two merchants, posting nine months apart and with no connection to each other, describe the same arithmetic: a 120-day hold, and then a further 365 days. For one it happened after the 120 days had run out; for the other it happened in the month the date was due to arrive.

The first says the account was terminated on 8 July 2025 and that the payout would be held for 120 days. "Though painful, i waited," they write. When they contacted Shopify after the 120 days, they say they were told the payout would be held for another 365 days — 485 days in total — and that they could not find the clause in the policies that allows it.¹

The second says their account went on hold in April 2026 and that an email named 29 August 2026 as the day their payouts would be deposited. In the month of that date they paid to reopen their store; a store review was added to the account a day or two later, and the date shown to them became 2027. They say support then split two ways: some agents told them the 29 August payout still stood because it was tied to Shopify Payments rather than to the store restriction, and others told them that because the appeal was denied the new date was April 2027.²

A third merchant describes the same thing happening a few days early rather than late. They say they were told a 20% hold would lift on 25 November 2025, that the reserve balance vanished from the account on 20 November in what support indicated was preparation for the payout, and that 25 November passed with no deposit. In the same week they were notified that Shopify Payments had been disabled on the store for "elevated risk of customer disputes".³

3. "Released" is not the same word as "deposited"

On an older thread a Shopify staff member answering a merchant who was past day 120 and unpaid drew the distinction plainly: "while the payment is released after 120 days, that is not the deposit date." The funds, the reply goes on, are released for processing on the date of release, and deposited after standard processing times.⁴ That is worth knowing before you count on a date, and it is also the gap the next report falls into.

A merchant whose account had been terminated some months earlier says the 120 days ran out, that they were emailed to say payouts would resume, and then emailed again to say the payout had failed — the old bank account was no longer available. Shopify support told them the bank account can only be changed while the store is open, and they cannot reopen the store, because the reason it was closed is that the business "presents a level of risk they are unable to support".⁵ That report is not in our record: it gives no figure, no closure date and no quoted payout date, and the record here takes an entry only when at least one of those is present. It is on this page because the shape of it is a thing to guard against, not a statistic.

4. Why no document you signed states an end date

Merchants who go looking for the clause that authorises 120 days, or 485, do not find it. The Shopify Payments Terms of Service contain no count of days applied to a reserve at all: we searched the full published text again on 16 September 2026 and the string "120" does not appear anywhere in it.⁶ What the agreement contains instead is a discretion, in the Reserves clause, to set reserve terms and to "change the terms of a Reserve Account at any time, for any reason". That clause is quoted at length on the Shopify Payments file.

The clause that covers the end of the relationship is separate, and it is the one that explains the missing number. Under Effects of Termination, the agreement says of a closed account:

So the timetable for paying you is not in the agreement between you and Shopify. It is deferred to the Payment Processor Terms — a separate document, between you and the processor behind Shopify Payments in your country, which you accepted at signup and almost certainly have not read since.⁶ That is the honest answer to the question the merchant above asked out loud: the clause they were looking for is not in the document they were looking in.

5. If the date you were given has passed

Nobody can promise you a way to make a hold end. These are the steps that preserve your position, in the order they stop being possible.

1. Write down the date, in a written channel, today. Send Shopify a message that states the date you were given, quotes the message that gave it to you, and asks for the new date and the reason it changed. A chat transcript or an email reply is a record; a phone call is not.
2. Check that the payout destination still works. A release that fails at the bank can put you back at the start, and the account details can only be changed from an open store.
3. Export the payout and balance history while the admin still opens. The figures you will need are the ones the platform will stop showing you.
4. Take it to a regulator if you are in a country that has one for this. In the United States, a CFPB complaint obliges many companies to answer in writing; Shopify's payments arm is not in that database, so read that page for which door applies to whom. In the United Kingdom, the Financial Ombudsman Service has published decisions on exactly this, and the pattern in them is narrow: what gets corrected is the time beyond the firm's own stated period.
5. File it here. Add your case to the record with the date, the figure and the source. A moved date that only exists in one inbox is invisible; the same date in a public record with a source is countable.

Sources

1. theresegoodall, "Payment held for 120 days, then another 365 days added", Shopify Community, 17 November 2025. community.shopify.com. All three posts read in full and verified 16 September 2026. Filed here as HF-2026-0066.
2. rell1, "120 day hold is now a 365 day hold?", Shopify Community, 1 August 2026. community.shopify.com. All five posts read in full and verified 16 September 2026. Filed here as HF-2026-0065.
3. user3533, "Shopify Scammed me out of 13k *RANT*", Shopify Community, 4 December 2025, and a later thread of 31 March 2026 about a second store by the same merchant. community.shopify.com · the later thread. Both read in full and verified 16 September 2026. Filed here as HF-2026-0063 and HF-2026-0064.
4. Shopify staff member Skye_1, replying to RetroTrapHouse on 26 April 2024 in AndreEcom's thread "Shopify Payments don't relase funds after 120 days", Shopify Community, opened 13 March 2024. community.shopify.com · archived copy. All 18 posts read in full and verified 11 September 2026. The merchants on this thread are filed here as HF-2026-0018, HF-2026-0019 and HF-2026-0020.
5. nico2, "Cannot Update Payout Bank After Account Termination – No Response from Support", Shopify Community, 16 April 2025. community.shopify.com. All three posts read in full and verified 16 September 2026. Not filed in the record: the post states no amount, no closure date and no quoted payout date, and the entry threshold requires at least one of those.
6. Shopify Payments Terms of Service, published by Shopify, at shopify.com/legal/terms-shopify-payments · archived copy. Quotation from the Effects of Termination clause in Part I, Section D. Retrieved and searched in full on 16 September 2026: the string "120" returns no match anywhere in the agreement. That search is scoped to this document as published on that date; the version you agreed to at signup may differ, and the Payment Processor Terms for your country are a separate document.