Three different limits govern how much history you can get out of a bank, and mixing them up is why so many cleanups stall. Reviewed August 2026 — banks change these quietly; treat figures as typical and verify against your own account. Corrections welcome by email.
The three limits
Bank feeds (~90 days). When QuickBooks or any app connects to your bank, the feed typically backfills about 90 days. This is a feed limitation, not your bank's retention.
CSV/spreadsheet exports (12–24 months, varies). Online banking download pages reach further back than feeds, with per-bank caps. Reported limits at our last review: Chase around 24 months (with a per-download row cap, so pull large histories in chunks); Bank of America around 18 months for checking and 12 for credit cards; Wells Fargo up to 18–24 months depending on account type. Other major banks generally fall in the same 12–24 month band.
PDF statements (typically 7 years). The deep archive. Every month you ever banked is usually there as a PDF under Statements & Documents — which is why our PDF converter exists: it's the only route to history older than the CSV window.
A 2025 shift worth knowing: banks are dropping QFX/OFX
Bank of America permanently discontinued QFX and OFX downloads on September 30, 2025, leaving CSV as the only transaction export. Expect more banks to follow — direct-download Web Connect files are quietly disappearing, which makes CSV-to-QBO conversion the standard path rather than the workaround.
The practical recipe for a full-history rebuild
1) Let the bank feed cover the most recent ~90 days. 2) CSV-export the window your bank allows and convert it with the CSV to QBO converter. 3) For anything older, download the monthly PDF statements and run them through the PDF converter. Import in date order and cut each file where the next source picks up to avoid overlaps — the full walkthrough is in our 90-day import guide, and per-bank export instructions live in the bank guides.