CARC 29
Filing deadline missed
The claim arrived after the payer's filing window closed. This is the one category that is genuinely unrecoverable.
Why you actually get this
- The claim was never submitted — often sitting in a worklist nobody owned.
- It was submitted to the wrong payer first and the clock ran at the right one.
- It was rejected early, corrected slowly, and resubmitted too late.
- A biller transition left the back book unworked.
How to check whether it’s correct
- 01Establish the payer's filing limit and the date of service — these vary from 90 days to a year.
- 02Find evidence of earlier submission; proof of timely filing sometimes exists and overturns this.
- 03Check whether the delay was caused by the payer's own processing.
Rarely worth appealing
Appeal only where you can evidence timely submission, or where the delay was the payer's. Otherwise this money is gone. The useful response is structural: a claim at day 80 is worth working, the same claim at day 100 may be worth nothing, so aged A/R deserves attention disproportionate to its size.
Often arrives with
Seeing a lot of these?
A single denial is a claim to work. A pattern of the same denial is a process to fix, and the two need completely different responses. A free panel reads ninety days of your claims data and shows which codes actually recur for you.
Claim Adjustment Reason Codes are maintained by X12 as External Code List 139. The official description of this code is theirs and is not reproduced here. Check the authoritative list for current wording and status.