The Fair Access to Banking Act: status in 2026 and what it would mean for Steam and adult games

The Fair Access to Banking Act has not passed. As of 7 October 2026 both versions of the bill, S.401 in the Senate and H.R.987 in the House, are where they were on the day they were introduced in February 2025: referred to committee, with no hearing on the bill recorded, no markup and no vote. What has changed is the number of supporters, which has kept rising, and the amount of action the US government has taken on the same subject without Congress.

The bill became known to players in July 2025, when Steam and itch.io removed adult games under pressure from payment companies and petitions pointed to S.401 as the remedy. This page explains what the bill says, where it stands, and how much of the problem it would solve for adult games. It is a summary of public documents and is not legal advice.

Key points

• Status: both bills are in committee. Neither has been voted on.
• Support: 47 cosponsors in the Senate and 148 in the House, all Republicans. The newest signed on in September 2026.
• What it does: bars large banks from refusing lawful customers for reasons other than quantified risk, and bars card networks from blocking lawful customers for “political or reputational risk considerations”.
• What it leaves out: payment processors such as Stripe and PayPal are not named, and banks under $10 billion in assets are outside its main rule.
• Deadline: the 119th Congress ends in January 2027. A bill that has not passed by then lapses and has to be introduced again.
• Meanwhile: an executive order, a bank regulator’s review and warning letters from the FTC have covered some of the same ground.

The bill at a glance

The figures come from the official bill status data published by the Government Publishing Office for S.401 and H.R.987, as last updated on 17 and 29 September 2026.

What the bill says

The text of S.401 is short. It has four working parts.

Large banks must give fair access

The main rule applies to a “covered bank”, which the bill presumes to be any bank with more than $10 billion in total assets. A covered bank must make each financial service it offers available to all persons in its market on proportionally equal terms. It may deny service only when the denial is justified by the person’s documented failure to meet “quantitative, impartial risk-based standards” that the bank established in advance.

The bill adds that this justification may not rest solely on reputational risk to the bank. It also tells banks to assess customers case by case and not by category.

Card networks may not block lawful customers for reputational reasons

Section 5 is the part gamers quote. It says that no payment card network may, “directly or through any agent, processor, or licensed member of the network”, prohibit or inhibit a person’s ability to obtain access to the network’s services “because of political or reputational risk considerations”, where that person is in compliance with the law.

A network that breaks this rule faces a civil penalty assessed by the Comptroller of the Currency of “not more than 10 percent of the value of the services or products” involved, “not to exceed $10,000 per violation”.

Penalties for banks and credit unions

Institutions that break the fair access rule could lose access to the Federal Reserve’s lending programs and electronic payment systems, and could have their deposit insurance terminated. The bill applies matching rules to credit unions.

A right to sue

A person who is refused in breach of the bill could bring a civil action in a federal court without first going to a regulator. A successful plaintiff would receive reasonable legal fees and costs, and treble damages.

Why the bill exists

The bill’s findings point to Operation Choke Point, a US government programme from the 2010s in which regulators pressed banks to drop lawful but disfavoured kinds of business. The bill says banks rightly objected to it, and then claims that banks adopting the same practices of their own accord “represents as great a threat to the national economy”.

Its stated purpose is to ensure that persons involved in “politically unpopular businesses but that are lawful under Federal law” receive fair access to financial services. The industries its sponsors usually name are firearms and fossil fuels. The bill itself names none.

It is not new. A federal regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, finalised a “fair access” rule along similar lines in January 2021, and it never took effect. Banking trade groups opposed it. The American Bankers Association urged the regulator to withdraw it, arguing that it would limit banks’ ability to manage risk. Versions of the bill have been introduced in Congress since then, and the current one is the latest.

How gamers found it

On 16 July 2025 Steam added a rule against content that might breach the standards of its payment processors, card networks and banks, and removed a set of adult games. A week later itch.io removed adult content from search. Valve said payment processors had cited a Mastercard rule on brand-damaging transactions. Our timeline of the removals has the dates.

Players looking for a remedy found S.401. A thread on itch.io’s forum urged readers to support it, petitions against payment company restrictions cited it, and on 28 July 2025 TheGamer reported that the bill “could stop banks and payment processors from threatening Steam and itch over adult games”.

The adult industry had already taken an interest. The Free Speech Coalition, the trade association for the adult industry in the United States, lists the bill among those it supports.

Would it protect adult games?

In part. The honest answer depends on which company in the payment chain is doing the refusing. Our page on how payment processors decide which adult games can be sold explains that chain.

Where the bill would help

The reason given to Valve in 2025 was “risk to the Mastercard brand”. That is a reputational reason, and section 5 is written against exactly that. Because the section covers a network acting “through any agent, processor, or licensed member”, it is also aimed at the indirect route by which a network’s rule reaches a store.

Where it would not

• Processors make their own rules. Stripe prohibits adult content and PayPal restricts it in their own terms. Stripe told itch.io in 2025 that card networks generally support adult content and that the restriction comes from its banking partners. If those partners are large banks, the bill would touch them. Stripe’s own policy would remain Stripe’s.
• Quantified risk is still a valid reason. A bank could still refuse a business on measured grounds. Adult merchants are classed as high risk partly because of disputed payments, and a bank could set a standard on that basis in advance.
• “Lawful” is a real condition. The bill protects persons who comply with the law. It would not stop a network refusing content it says is illegal, and what counts as unlawful sexual content is contested in US law.
• The penalty on networks is small. $10,000 per violation is modest for companies of that size. The right to sue with treble damages applies to covered banks.
• It is United States law. A studio in Portugal selling to buyers in Europe through a European bank would see a change only if the networks changed their rules worldwide.

A reasonable summary is that the bill would remove the argument that was used in 2025 and would leave several others standing.

What has happened without Congress

Three actions by the executive branch since August 2025 have covered some of the same ground.

The executive order. On 7 August 2025 the president signed “Guaranteeing Fair Banking for All Americans”. It defines “politicized or unlawful debanking” as restricting financial services on the basis of a customer’s political or religious beliefs, or of “lawful business activities that the financial service provider disagrees with or disfavors for political reasons”. It gave federal banking regulators 180 days to remove “reputation risk or equivalent concepts” from their guidance and examination manuals.

The regulator’s review. On 10 December 2025 the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency published preliminary findings on the nine largest national banks. It found that between 2020 and 2023 they had restricted access for certain lawful industries, and it listed them: oil and gas exploration, coal mining, firearms, private prisons, tobacco and e-cigarette manufacturers, adult entertainment, and digital assets. That is an official US finding that large banks restricted adult entertainment as a category.

The FTC letters. On 26 March 2026 the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission sent warning letters to the chief executives of PayPal, Stripe, Visa and Mastercard. They warned that denying customers access to financial services in a way that is inconsistent with a company’s terms of service or a customer’s reasonable expectations may violate the FTC Act. PC Gamer noted that the letter to Mastercard said it must not “countenance unlawful debanking by members that process transactions on its network”.

None of the three was written with games in mind. The order’s own examples concern political and religious views, and the FTC’s announcement does not mention adult content. PC Gamer’s assessment was that the FTC is not coming to the rescue of game developers, although the letters could help them.

The executive order and the bill compared

The comparison explains why supporters still want the bill. An order can be withdrawn by the next administration. A statute cannot.

What happens next

The 119th Congress ends on 3 January 2027. A bill that has not passed both chambers by then lapses, and its sponsors would have to introduce it again in the next Congress and collect cosponsors afresh.

Passing the Senate normally takes 60 votes to end debate. The Senate bill has 47 cosponsors, all from one party. A bill with that profile usually needs support from the other party or a place inside a larger package to become law. Neither had been reported when this page was written.

For anyone following the bill for the sake of games, three signs are worth watching:

1. A hearing or markup of the bill in either committee, which would be the first recorded action since February 2025.
2. A cosponsor from the Democratic party.
3. Any formal rule from a US regulator that applies to card networks and not only to banks.

What this means for developers and players

• Do not plan around it. The bill has not moved in twenty months. A release schedule should assume today’s payment rules.
• Know which rule affects you. If a store removed a game, the cause may be a processor’s own policy, which this bill would not change. See the Visa and Mastercard adult content policy for the network rules.
• It is a US bill. Only people represented in Congress can ask a member to support it. Players elsewhere are affected by the outcome and have no vote in it.
• Our tracker follows the rules that are in force. The adult games platform policy tracker records what each store and processor allows now.

How this page was put together

The bill’s provisions are quoted from the text published by the Government Publishing Office. Sponsors, cosponsor counts and actions come from the official bill status data, read on 7 October 2026. The party counts were taken from that data and not from a news report. The executive order, the regulator’s findings and the FTC’s announcement are quoted from the issuing bodies. The assessment of what the bill would and would not reach is our reading of the text. No court has interpreted it, because it is not law.

This page was written on 7 October 2026 and will be updated when either bill has a recorded action or the Congress ends. To report an error, see the corrections standard.