Why 364-day credit lines renew one day earlier each year

Mondelez International signed a new credit agreement on 18 February 2026. The one it replaced was dated 19 February 2025.

Emerson Electric signed on 10 February 2026, replacing an agreement of 11 February 2025. Disney: 27 February 2026, replacing 28 February 2025. Nike: 6 March 2026, replacing 7 March 2025.

Four companies, four industries, and every renewal dated exactly one day earlier than the year before. That is not a coincidence and it is not a scheduling quirk. It is the term of the loan, showing up on a calendar.

The arithmetic

These are 364-day credit facilities — committed revolving bank lines written to run one day short of a year.

364 days  =  52 weeks × 7 days
Same term  →  same weekday, every year
Same weekday  →  one calendar date earlier, every year

Renew on a Friday in 2025 and the 364-day anniversary is a Friday in 2026 — but a Friday that falls one date sooner. Do it for a decade and the agreement drifts across the month.

Eight companies did exactly that this year. Every pair below comes from a single filing that names both the new agreement and the one it replaced.

Disney’s filing closes the loop without any help from us. The agreement is dated 27 February 2026 and the same 8-K states it “will expire on February 26, 2027.” Count forward 364 days from the first date and you land on the second.

What the line is actually for

A 364-day facility is rarely about borrowing. Two filings say what it is for in plain words.

Disney, on the pair of agreements it signed in February:

“The Credit Agreements support the Company’s commercial paper borrowings and are available for other general corporate purposes.”

Honeywell Aerospace, in the information statement for its spin-off, is more explicit still — and puts a number on the relationship:

“Aerospace entered into the Credit Facilities … in an aggregate committed amount as of the date of the distribution of $4.0 billion, and intends to enter into a $4.0 billion senior unsecured commercial paper program. … The undrawn portion of the Credit Facilities will serve as a backup facility for the issuance of the commercial paper program.”

The revolver and the commercial paper programme are the same size, to the dollar. That is the whole design: the company funds itself in the CP market at short maturities and cheap rates, and the bank line exists so that a buyer of that paper knows what happens if the CP market closes. It is insurance that is priced to be unused.

Which is why the interesting question about these facilities is never how much was drawn. It is whether the line was still there the following year.

The exception, and what it shows

One company did draw in 2026, and the circumstances make the point.

Parker-Hannifin states that on 13 August 2026, in connection with completing a merger, it borrowed $5.25 billion under its 364-Day Credit Facility and $2.50 billion under a three-year facility to pay part of the purchase price — $7.75 billion in a single day.

That is a 364-day line used as acquisition bridge financing rather than as a CP backstop. Same instrument, entirely different job, and it shows up as an actual borrowing rather than as a commitment. When a company that size draws its short line, the filing says so.

Who broke the pattern

Three of the eleven pairs we checked did not land on 364 days, and each one is informative.

GE HealthCare moved its renewal a full month earlier — and still landed on a Thursday. 336 days is 48 weeks, another whole number of them. The company changed when it refinances without changing how the instrument counts.

Honeywell’s shift sits alongside a corporate separation: the same March filing describes a $3.0 billion 364-day commitment that “will be automatically reduced to $2.0 billion” on completion of the spin-off.

And two companies stopped

The pattern’s real test is not the interval. It is whether the line gets renewed at all.

In August, two large borrowers let theirs go. Target terminated a $1.0 billion 364-day agreement dated 9 October 2025, and Cardinal Health terminated a $1.0 billion 364-day agreement dated 7 October 2025. Neither renewed separately. Both folded the capacity into a single five-year revolving facility, part of a wider cluster of replacements — six large borrowers signed new revolvers in twelve business days, all maturing in 2031.

Whether that is the start of something is not answerable from two filings, and the aggregate does not support it yet.

Fifty-one filings so far in 2026, against an average of 50 across the four preceding windows — 2% higher, which is to say unchanged. The 27 distinct registrants behind those filings are a roll call of investment-grade America: Honeywell, Disney, PepsiCo, Nike, Salesforce, Accenture, General Motors, Emerson, Danaher, ADP, Mondelez, Boston Scientific, Zimmer Biomet, Stanley Black & Decker, Dover, Williams, Enterprise Products, GE HealthCare, Evergy, Athene, American Honda Finance, Parker-Hannifin, Cencora, Target and Cardinal Health.

The sizes are not small. ADP’s 364-day line went from $4.55 billion to $5.7 billion this June, up 25.3% in one renewal. Disney’s is $5.25 billion. Emerson’s is $2.0 billion. Enterprise Products’ is $1.5 billion, extendable to $1.7 billion. Zimmer Biomet’s is $1.25 billion. American Honda Finance splits $8.5 billion into three equal tranches of $2,833,333,333 apiece — 364-day, three-year and five-year.

What this is not

• The counts are search results, not facilities. EDGAR full-text search returns filings containing the phrase “364-Day Credit Agreement”. A single renewal can generate several filings, and a filing can mention the phrase only in an exhibit index. Treat the bars as activity, not as a census.
• We did not read all 51. We read the earliest filing from each of the 27 registrants. Every date, size and quotation above comes from a document we opened.
• The filings never say why 364 days. The reason usually given — that a commitment with an original maturity of one year or less carries lighter capital treatment for the lending bank — comes from law-firm commentary, and no filing quoted here states it. What the filings prove is the arithmetic, not the motive.
• Eleven pairs is not the population. We could only measure an interval where a single document named both agreements by date. Companies that renewed without naming the predecessor are absent from that table.
• One-day drift is not evidence of anything about credit conditions. It is a consequence of the term. A company in trouble and a company in perfect health both produce the same calendar.

Check it yourself

Every interval above can be re-derived from two dates in one document. Open the Mondelez exhibit and the agreement is headed “364-DAY REVOLVING CREDIT AGREEMENT dated as of February 18, 2026”; the definitions section names the predecessor “dated as of February 19, 2025”. Same structure in the Nike, Emerson, Disney, Enterprise Products, ADP and Zimmer Biomet filings, all linked above.

The counts come from EDGAR’s own full-text search, which anyone can run at sec.gov/edgar/search with the phrase in quotes and the form type set to 8-K. We used the search only to build a candidate list; every fact in this article was read from the filing itself, which is the same rule we set out in our note on how a number gets verified after full-text search once produced a false positive here.

No share prices appear in this article.

If a figure here does not match a filing, tell us and it will be corrected on the article and on the corrections log, with the date.