SAFE Banking's Slow March: Will Cannabis Finally Get a Bank Account?

August 26, 2026

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Ed Perlmutter introduced the first version of what became the SAFE Banking Act back in 2013. Thirteen years, seven separate House passages, and zero Senate floor votes later, the bill is once again sitting in committee, and once again the same question is on the table: does this finally get a vote, or does it die the way it always has? The honest answer, based on the bill's own track record rather than the optimism of any given press release, is that nothing about the 2026 version's early trajectory suggests the pattern is about to break.

That matters more than usual right now because of timing. The SAFE Banking Act of 2026 has just 18 combined House and Senate cosponsors as of August 20, 2026 — a fraction of the more than 150 House cosponsors the bill picked up within months back in 2019. Meanwhile, the Blanche Order moved marijuana to Schedule III effective April 28, 2026, and a lot of people assumed that would ease pressure on the banking fight by making cannabis look more like a normal regulated product. It hasn't. Banks still don't have explicit federal guidance telling them how to treat cannabis-related deposits, and the agencies that would issue that guidance — FinCEN, the OCC, the FDIC, the Federal Reserve — have been silent on the point for months after rescheduling took effect.

So this piece is going to do something a little different than track the news cycle: it's going to use the bill's 13-year history as the actual predictive model. Legislation like this doesn't move because of vibes or press conferences. It moves according to identifiable mechanics — cosponsor accumulation rates, committee markup timing, and whether it gets attached to something that absolutely has to pass. Those mechanics are visible right now, and they tell a fairly specific story about what's likely, and not likely, to happen between now and the end of the 119th Congress.

A Bill That Keeps Passing the House and Dying in the Senate

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Start with the shape of the last decade, because it's unusually clean for a piece of federal legislation. Ed Perlmutter, then the Democratic representative from Colorado's 7th district, introduced the first cannabis banking bill in 2013, not long after Colorado and Washington legalized recreational sales. It went nowhere for years. Then, on March 28, 2019, the House Financial Services Committee voted 45-15 to advance the SAFE Banking Act, and by that point more than a third of the entire House had already signed on as cosponsors before the bill even left committee. That's a genuinely fast buildup of support, and it set the template for what followed: versions of this bill have now passed the full House seven separate times since 2019, sometimes as standalone legislation and sometimes tucked into broader defense or financial packages.

The Senate is a different story entirely. It took until 2023 — a full decade after Perlmutter's original bill — for the Senate Banking Committee to even hold a markup, advancing a renamed version called the SAFER Banking Act by a 14-9 vote. That was the first Senate committee vote on cannabis banking in the bill's history. And even that milestone, arrived at after ten years of House momentum, never converted into an actual floor vote. It sat. The Senate simply never scheduled it, and the 118th Congress ended without further action.

What that ten-year gap tells you is not that cannabis banking lacks support. The House has demonstrated support seven times over, across multiple Congresses and party configurations. What it tells you is that the House and Senate are not the same obstacle. The House has a majority-rules floor process where committee-passed bills with broad cosponsor support tend to get votes. The Senate runs on unanimous consent and leadership discretion, where a single committee chair or majority leader can simply decline to schedule something indefinitely, and there's no procedural mechanism that forces the issue absent a discharge-type maneuver or attachment to a must-pass vehicle. The bottleneck is structural and specific to the Senate floor calendar, not a reflection of whether senators privately support the idea. That distinction matters enormously for anyone trying to forecast 2026-2027, because it means House passage number eight, if it happens, tells you almost nothing new about the odds of a Senate vote.

Where the 2026 Version Stands Right Now

Cosponsor support for SAFE/SAFER Banking legislation has dropped sharply since 2019, when the House bill quickly gathered 150 cosponsors, compared to just 18 for the combined 2026 version as of August 20, with no cosponsor data recorded for the 2023 Senate markup.

The current version of the bill was introduced on June 24, 2026 by Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, with Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and Steve Daines of Montana signing on as cosponsors — a genuinely bipartisan lineup, spanning two Republicans and two Democrats from opposite ends of the ideological map. The House companion, H.R. 9471, followed a day later, introduced by Dave Joyce of Ohio's 14th district with a similarly mixed slate: Jim Himes, Warren Davidson, Nydia Velázquez, Brian Mast, Lou Correa, Guy Reschenthaler, and Dina Titus among the initial cosponsors.

Procedurally, H.R. 9471 was referred not just to Financial Services but also to the Judiciary and Veterans' Affairs committees, and as of this writing there's no further committee action recorded on either side of the Capitol. That referral to three committees instead of one is itself a mild signal — it usually means more veto points, more scheduling dependencies, and more opportunities for the bill to simply stall in a queue rather than get an up-or-down vote.

The cosponsor numbers are the part worth sitting with the longest. By August 20, 2026, the bill had added exactly two new House cosponsors — Troy Carter and Mike Rogers — bringing the combined House and Senate total to 18. Compare that to 2019, when the House version cleared 150 cosponsors within a matter of months, well before committee markup even happened. Eighteen cosponsors roughly seven weeks after introduction, versus 150-plus within a similar window seven years earlier, is not a subtle difference. It's the kind of gap that shows up when the underlying coalition supporting the bill hasn't refreshed itself — many of the original 2019-era champions have retired, lost primaries, or moved to other committees, and the newer members of Congress simply haven't been organized around this issue the way the previous generation was.

Layer onto that the fact that the 119th Congress has roughly six months of working legislative time left as of this writing, and that SAFE Banking was absent from the floor calendar under Republican control as of May 2026 — despite the bill advancing in each of the past three Democratic-led Congresses. Republican leadership controls what reaches the floor, and nothing so far indicates they've made room for it.

Rescheduling Didn't Solve the Banking Problem

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A lot of people, inside and outside the industry, assumed that once cannabis got rescheduled, banks would quietly follow. That assumption rests on a misunderstanding of what rescheduling actually does. The Blanche Order, effective April 28, 2026, moved FDA-approved marijuana products and state-licensed medical cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III. That's a meaningful change — it affects federal tax treatment under Section 280E and eases some research barriers that have hampered clinical study of cannabis for decades. What it does not touch, at all, is the Bank Secrecy Act or the federal money-laundering statutes that are the actual legal basis for banks treating cannabis revenue as suspicious activity requiring extra reporting.

Those two bodies of law — drug scheduling and financial-crime statutes — are administered by entirely different agencies and respond to entirely different triggers. Schedule III status doesn't instruct FinCEN to change its guidance, and as of July 1, 2026, FinCEN, the OCC, the FDIC, and the Federal Reserve had issued no cannabis-specific updates reflecting the new schedule. Banks are, in a very literal sense, operating with the same regulatory uncertainty they had before April 28th, just with a different word attached to the drug on paper.

Cannabis banking advocates have been explicit about this, and it's worth taking their argument seriously rather than treating it as industry self-interest: legal clarity for financial institutions is a categorically separate problem from drug scheduling, and one doesn't automatically fix the other. This is essentially the same mistake people made in 2014, 2016, and 2018, when each new wave of state legalization was followed by predictions that banks would simply start serving the industry because the state-level stigma had lifted. It never happened at scale, for the same underlying reason it isn't happening now — federal law, not state law, governs what a bank must report to examiners, and federal law hasn't changed on that specific point. Rescheduling changed the drug's classification. It did not touch the reporting obligations that make a compliance officer's life difficult, and that's the actual thing standing between a dispensary and a checking account.

Why Banks Themselves Are Pushing Harder Now

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If there's a genuinely new element in the 2026 push, it's who's doing the lobbying. In July 2026, the American Bankers Association sent a letter to House and Senate leadership framing SAFE Banking not as a favor to the cannabis industry but as a public-safety and anti-illicit-finance measure. That framing is deliberate, and it's a shift from how the bill was pitched in earlier years, when the pitch leaned more heavily on industry growth and access to capital.

Part of what's driving the ABA's posture is a very specific mechanical detail buried in the bill's text: it requires banks to amend or replace the FinCEN guidance from February 14, 2014 — document FIN-2014-G001 — within 180 days of enactment. That guidance is now well over a decade old. It predates the vast majority of state-legal adult-use markets, predates Schedule III, predates most of the compliance infrastructure banks have built since. Banks aren't asking for permission to enter a new business line so much as asking for someone to update a rulebook that's badly out of sync with the market it's supposedly governing.

The public-safety framing also has more organic bipartisan pull than the growth argument ever did. Cash-intensive dispensaries remain a documented target for robbery — a predictable consequence of an industry forced to operate largely outside the banking system, holding large cash reserves with limited ability to move that cash into secured accounts. That's a harder argument for a skeptical senator to wave off than pull demand from cannabis retailers wanting easier merchant services.

Notably, it isn't the megabanks driving this. It's community and regional banks — the ones that have been quietly banking cannabis-adjacent clients for years under patchwork state guidance and their own internal risk tolerance, and who are the most exposed if that patchwork gets challenged or if examiners tighten enforcement. They want a clear federal rule precisely because they're already improvising one.

Historically, bank lobbying has moved the Senate on financial regulation more reliably than industry-specific lobbying alone — that's a pattern visible in past fights over interchange fees and consumer-protection rules. Whether that historical pattern repeats here, with the ABA effectively vouching for an industry it has no direct stake in, is one of the more interesting open questions of the next year.

What History Predicts for the Next 1-3 Years

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Run the 13-year pattern forward and the base case is unglamorous: expect another House passage attempt at some point in the 119th Congress, and expect it to die again without a Senate floor vote, absent some external forcing event. That's not pessimism, it's just what happened seven times running, and nothing about the 2026 bill's cosponsor trajectory or committee posture suggests the underlying Senate bottleneck has changed.

The forcing event is the variable actually worth tracking. SAFE Banking has historically advanced furthest not as standalone legislation but when riders got attached to broader packages — defense authorization bills, larger financial-services packages, omnibus spending vehicles. Riders bypass the need for a dedicated floor slot, since the underlying package is already must-pass. Watch for exactly this kind of attempt around the next appropriations cycle or defense authorization debate in 2026 or 2027; that's the mechanism that's come closest to working before, and it's the most plausible path to an actual vote this cycle too.

There's a real counter-case to the pessimistic base rate, and it deserves equal weight rather than a token mention. If ABA lobbying keeps intensifying, if Murkowski and Daines actively work Republican colleagues rather than just lending their names, and if the confusion created by Schedule III's incomplete implementation keeps generating headlines about banks still refusing cannabis accounts eighteen months after supposed reform, that combination could move faster than the historical baseline predicts. Bank lobbying with an explicit public-safety frame is a different animal than cannabis-industry lobbying alone, and it's untested at this scale for this specific bill.

But the risk to that optimistic read is sitting right in the cosponsor numbers: 18 versus 150-plus at the same point in 2019 is a real gap, not noise, and Republican leadership hasn't put the bill on the floor calendar as of mid-2026 despite three previous Democratic-led Congresses managing to advance it. Momentum has to show up somewhere before it produces a vote, and right now it isn't showing up in the metric that's mattered most historically.

One more thing worth setting expectations around: even in a scenario where SAFE Banking passes and gets signed, the 180-day clock for replacing FIN-2014-G001 means banks wouldn't see new operational guidance for roughly six months after enactment. There's a real precedent for this kind of gradual, multi-stage rollout — interstate banking deregulation under the Riegle-Neal Act of 1994 took over a decade of incremental state-level compacts before a comprehensive federal fix arrived. Cannabis banking may well follow that same slow, state-by-state-then-federal arc rather than a single clean breakthrough.

Seven House passages and zero Senate votes across thirteen years isn't an unlucky streak — it's a pattern with an identifiable cause, and the 2026 bill's early numbers haven't given anyone a reason to bet against that pattern continuing. Eighteen cosponsors seven weeks in, no committee movement on the House side beyond referral, and no floor calendar slot under the current Senate majority all point the same direction the last decade already pointed.

The more interesting twist is what rescheduling actually did. It was supposed to take pressure off the banking fight by making cannabis look more like a conventional regulated product. Instead it exposed how separate the two problems always were — banks now have Schedule III status to point to and still no FinCEN, OCC, FDIC, or Federal Reserve guidance telling them what to do with it. That gap is exactly why the American Bankers Association is leaning in harder in 2026 rather than standing down, and it's worth taking that as a signal rather than background noise. Banks don't lobby Congress over problems that have already resolved themselves.

If you want to know whether this actually moves in the next year or two, skip the press releases and watch two numbers: whether the combined cosponsor count starts climbing toward something closer to the 2019 pace, and whether SAFE Banking language shows up attached to a defense authorization bill, an appropriations package, or some other vehicle that has to pass regardless. Those are the two things that have moved this bill in the past. Everything else — statements of support, op-eds, another committee hearing — has happened before, repeatedly, and none of it has ever been enough on its own.