Metro 2 Terms Frequency Codes (Field 28)
One character stating how often a payment is contractually due, and the unit that makes Terms Duration mean anything.
11 codes documented · Base Segment · 1 character at position 194–194 · CRRG Base Segment field definition, Terms Frequency
All terms frequency codes at a glance
How terms frequency codes work
Terms Frequency states how often a contractual payment falls due. On its own it looks like a trivia field, but it is the unit that gives Terms Duration a meaning: 060 with Terms Frequency M is a five-year loan, 060 with Terms Frequency W is a fourteen-month loan, and the two records are indistinguishable if the frequency is wrong. Nearly every downstream consumer of the file, from amortization checks to debt-to-income estimates, reads Terms Duration through this one byte.
The single most important thing to understand about this field is that Metro 2 assumes a MONTHLY reporting cycle. One record per account per month, one Payment History Profile position per month, one Account Status per month. Terms Frequency, however, can describe a cadence faster than that cycle. W (weekly), B (bi-weekly) and E (semi-monthly) all mean several contractual payments fall inside a single reported cycle, and the format has no field in which to express what happened to each of them individually. The monthly record can say the account is current or thirty days past due; it cannot say the consumer made three of four weekly payments.
That mismatch is not academic. It is precisely why point-of-sale Pay-in-Four and similar buy-now-pay-later products have been hard to furnish. A four-payment plan on a bi-weekly cadence completes in about six weeks, which is one or two reporting cycles. The plan can be opened, paid, and closed between two monthly snapshots, and a delinquency on payment two can be cured before any file is ever produced. Portfolio Type I is the right answer for the product shape, but the cadence question is genuinely unsettled, and this library will not manufacture a rule the in-repo source does not state.
The second set-wide rule is that Scheduled Monthly Payment is a MONTHLY figure regardless of Terms Frequency. It does not become the weekly payment because Terms Frequency is W. A furnisher reporting a $150 bi-weekly payment as 000015000 in Scheduled Monthly Payment is understating the consumer's monthly obligation by roughly $175, and that error propagates directly into every debt-to-income calculation the tradeline touches. Converting to a monthly equivalent is the furnisher's job, and getting it wrong is the classic error of this field.
The rest of the set is straightforward. M (monthly) covers the overwhelming majority of consumer credit and is the safe default when the contract genuinely bills monthly. D (deferred) and P (single payment) are the two values that describe an absence of a recurring schedule rather than a slower one, and they carry their own cross-field consequences around Scheduled Monthly Payment and the K4 Specialized Payment Information segment. L, Q, T, S and Y describe genuinely slower cadences and are rare in consumer files but real in agricultural, seasonal, and some commercial lending.
Sub-Monthly Cadence
More than one contractual payment falls inside a single monthly reporting cycle.
Weekly
A payment is contractually due every week. Four or five payments therefore fall inside a single monthly reporting cycle, which the format has no way to represent individually.
Bi-weekly
A payment is contractually due every two weeks, twenty-six times a year. Most months contain two payments and twice a year a month contains three.
Semi-monthly
Two payments are due each month, normally on fixed calendar dates such as the first and the fifteenth. Twenty-four payments a year, always exactly two per reporting cycle.
Monthly
One payment per reporting cycle, aligned exactly with the Metro 2 monthly record.
Slower Than Monthly
One payment spans several reporting cycles, so most months carry no due date.
Bi-monthly
A payment is due every two months, six times a year. Half the reporting cycles contain a due date and half do not.
Quarterly
A payment is due every three months, four times a year. Two out of every three reporting cycles carry no payment obligation.
Tri-annually
A payment is due three times a year, every four months. Three out of every four reporting cycles carry no payment obligation.
Semi-annually
A payment is due twice a year, every six months. Five out of every six reporting cycles carry no payment obligation.
Annually
A payment is due once a year. Eleven of every twelve reporting cycles carry no payment obligation, which makes this the slowest cadence in the set.
No Recurring Schedule
Payments are suspended, or the whole obligation comes due at once.
Deferred
No payment is contractually due right now. The obligation exists and usually keeps accruing, but the payment schedule is suspended for a defined period.
Single Payment
The entire obligation comes due in one payment on one date. There is no recurring schedule at all, which makes this the opposite of a frequency.
Related reading
Other Metro 2 code sets
Every CRRG code set has its own reference. The Metro 2 codes cheat sheet puts all of them on one page.
Check the terms frequency codes in a real file
Drop a .dat file into the free in-browser viewer and see which codes your own records carry. No signup, and nothing is uploaded — the file stays on your device.