Legacy Treasury Direct: FS Form 5179 Transfer and FS Form 5178

Legacy Treasury Direct is the older of the two accounts the U.S. Treasury lets individuals use to hold marketable securities such as bills, notes and bonds, and it is the one that has been closing to new business for years. If your statement shows an 11-digit account number, you are in it, and the paper form that moves your securities out is FS Form 5179, titled “Legacy Treasury Direct Security Transfer Request” and revised August 2022.

If a statement or a search result mentioned “5179” and you cannot tell whether it applies to you, the answer depends entirely on which system holds the securities, so that is where we start.

Telling the two systems apart

Treasury’s help page for Legacy Treasury Direct gives a test you can run in a few seconds. If the account number has “11 numbers and no letters, it is a Legacy Treasury Direct account,” and the page’s example is 1200-345-6789. If it is “a letter followed by 9 numbers, it is a TreasuryDirect account,” with the example A123-456-789. The distinction matters because the forms are not interchangeable. FS Form 5179 is for Legacy. A TreasuryDirect account sends securities to a bank or broker with FS Form 5511, opened from the account’s External Transfer option, which we walk through in our guide to FS Form 5511 for moving Treasuries out of TreasuryDirect.

What Legacy still does, and what it no longer does

Treasury’s own wording is blunt. The help page says, “We are phasing out our old program, Legacy Treasury Direct,” and it lists what you can no longer do there: open a new account, buy securities, reinvest securities, and transfer securities from outside Legacy into a Legacy account. It also lists what remains. Interest and maturity proceeds are paid automatically into the bank account listed on the account, and Treasury still mails a Form 1099-INT each tax year for securities that earned interest or gains or losses. Treasury can still withhold taxes for you on request, up to 50 percent of the money you earn, if you give your account number and the percentage you want. One small tax-season detail is easy to miss. Even if you have transferred everything out, the page says to keep your address current in the account until you receive your final tax statement.

The same intent appears in two Treasury publications about seven and a half years apart. FS Publication 0103 (revised July 2015) says, “Treasury is phasing out Legacy Treasury Direct.” FS Publication 009 (revised January 2023) lists three choices for customers, which are keeping securities in Legacy, moving them to TreasuryDirect, or moving them to a bank or broker, and adds: “To keep securities in Legacy for now, customers need not do anything.”

That second sentence is the honest answer to the urgency some third-party summaries create. I looked for an official closing date in the help page, the forms and both publications and did not find one, and I would not repeat a date I cannot trace to Treasury. The practical case for moving is not a deadline. It is that you cannot sell from Legacy, so any time you want out before maturity, or want to hold the position somewhere you can manage it, the transfer is the only door.

Why selling means transferring first

On the help page the line is short: “To sell securities, you must transfer them to a bank, broker, or dealer.” Treasury’s page on moving securities between systems adds that for any transfer from or within Legacy you must fill out Form 5179 and mail it. If the receiving party is a bank, broker or dealer, Treasury says to contact it first to get the information the form needs. Once the securities arrive, you sell them there, as described for TreasuryDirect holders in our guide to selling a T-bill before maturity.

FS Form 5179, section by section

The form runs four pages: two to complete and two of instructions. Treasury estimates about 10 minutes to fill it out.

Section 1, account information. You print the Legacy account number and the account name exactly as they appear on your Statement of Account. The instructions add that all the information Section 2 asks for is listed on that same statement, so keep it in front of you.

Section 2, securities and amount. There are three boxes, and the instructions say to check the ones that apply. The first transfers all the securities in the account. The second lists specific securities by CUSIP (the security identifier, which the instructions illustrate as 912795XXX) with a dollar amount for each. The form has room for nine CUSIPs and says “Additional forms are required for more than 9 CUSIPs.” The third moves part of a single CUSIP and then requires the sub-account numbers and amounts from your statement. For partial transfers the instructions put one warning in capitals: the amount transferred and the amount remaining in the CUSIP “MUST SATISFY BOTH THE MINIMUM AND MULTIPLE HOLDING REQUIREMENTS FOR THE SECURITY.” The form does not state those requirements. They are specific to each security, so confirm them for yours before choosing a partial transfer, or take the whole position.

Section 3, transfer instructions. You check only one of three destinations. An internal transfer to another Legacy account is allowed only if the receiving account already exists, because “new accounts are not available.” A transfer to an established online TreasuryDirect account requires that account’s number, name and taxpayer identification number if available. An external transfer to a financial institution or brokerage firm asks for a routing number, the institution’s wire name, the agent or broker name, phone number and address, and special handling instructions, and the form warns that missing any of these could delay the transfer. The instructions add the rule that trips people up: securities cannot be transferred to a checking or savings account. Instead, you contact the receiving institution for its book-entry delivery instructions. Treasury’s sample shows a wire name such as “ABC BK/TRUST” with special handling instructions that read “FURTHER CREDIT TO” the customer’s brokerage account number, so ask the receiving firm to dictate its own wording rather than guessing.

There is also a checkbox for a transfer between spouses or incident to a divorce. The instructions say that if it is not checked, Treasury will assume the transfer is neither.

Section 4, signatures and certification. The signature must be in ink and in front of a certifying officer, and if there are two owners joined by the word “and,” both must sign. Acceptable certifying officers include authorized employees of insured depository institutions and corporate central credit unions. Brokers must use a medallion stamp. And the instructions say plainly: “Certification by a notary public is NOT acceptable.” Our guide to which TreasuryDirect form needs a notary or a certifying officer covers the broader pattern. The form also will not be accepted if it has any alterations or corrections, so a crossed-out figure means starting on a fresh copy.

Timing, with an example

The instructions tie delivery to the calendar: “this form must be received at least ten business days in advance of” the maturity date of the security or an interest payment date for the security. Notice the verb is received, not mailed. Take an interest payment date of Friday, January 15, 2027. Counting back ten weekdays lands on Friday, January 1, 2027, which is New Year’s Day, a federal holiday; skipping it moves the date to Thursday, December 31, 2026, so the form has to be in Treasury’s hands by then, which means mailing it earlier still, and getting your signature certified before that. The calculation is mine, using the form’s rule; the form does not say how it counts days or holidays, so allow extra margin.

Send the form to Treasury Retail Securities Services, PO Box 9150, Minneapolis, MN 55480-9150. After the transfer you receive a Legacy Treasury Direct Statement of Account, though the form notes that under certain circumstances there may be a hold on the account and no statement will be mailed. Treasury’s number for questions is 844-284-2676, or +1-304-480-6464 from outside the United States. Phone numbers you may find on older mirror sites, including a “Bureau of Public Debt” 1-800 line, do not appear in the current Treasury sources I reviewed.

FS Form 5178, for changes rather than transfers

FS Form 5178, the “Legacy Treasury Direct Transaction Request” (revised May 2019), is easy to confuse with 5179 because the numbers are adjacent. Its first instruction is the dividing line: “This form can’t be used to transfer securities.” It exists for housekeeping on an account that stays open, and it offers six boxes: consolidating identical Legacy accounts (same name, address, taxpayer identification number and payment information), a name change, an address change, a telephone number change, a payment information change, and a taxpayer identification number correction.

A few limits are worth knowing. You may not use it to remove the first-named owner. It can add or remove a second-named owner or beneficiary, but that needs a certified signature. A change of registration to or from a trust works only if the taxpayer identification number is not changing; if you want to move to a trust that will use a different number, the form says to open a TreasuryDirect account and move the securities there with FS Form 5179. A change to direct deposit information requires a certified signature, and if both the account and the receiving bank account are in individuals’ names, at least one of the individuals named on the Legacy account must be named on the deposit account. Address and phone changes carry no certification requirement in the instructions’ list, though the form must always be signed in ink with an original signature. The same notary rule applies here as well.

A sensible order of operations

If you have decided to leave, start with the receiving side. Open or confirm the destination account, ask the firm for its book-entry delivery instructions, pull your latest Statement of Account for the CUSIPs and amounts, and only then visit a bank or credit union for the certified signature. If you are comfortable staying put, nothing in Treasury’s materials requires action now, and the remaining Legacy features (automatic payment into your bank account and the annual 1099-INT) continue as described. If the hurdle is TreasuryDirect’s new sign-in step for the account you would move to, our guide on what still works without ID.me covers the options.

Sources

• U.S. Treasury, TreasuryDirect, “Legacy Treasury Direct” help page: https://www.treasurydirect.gov/help-center/legacy-treasury-direct/
• U.S. Treasury, TreasuryDirect, “Transferring Between Systems”: https://www.treasurydirect.gov/marketable-securities/transferring-between-systems/
• Bureau of the Fiscal Service, FS Form 5179 (Revised August 2022), Legacy Treasury Direct Security Transfer Request: https://www.treasurydirect.gov/forms/sec5179.pdf
• Bureau of the Fiscal Service, FS Form 5178 (Revised May 2019), Legacy Treasury Direct Transaction Request: https://www.treasurydirect.gov/forms/sec5178.pdf
• Bureau of the Fiscal Service, FS Publication 009 (Revised January 2023), Investing Directly With the U.S. Treasury: https://www.treasurydirect.gov/forms/sec009.pdf
• Bureau of the Fiscal Service, FS Publication 0103 (Revised July 2015), Trust Transactions, Legacy Treasury Direct: https://www.treasurydirect.gov/forms/sec0103.pdf