Futures Month Codes: What the Letter in a Contract Symbol Means

The letter buried in a futures symbol is the delivery month, and the twelve of them run F, G, H, J, K, M, N, Q, U, V, X, Z from January to December. So ESZ25 is a December contract and ESU25 is a September one, and they are two separate markets that happen to track the same index.

Nothing about that letter is guessable, which is why it trips people up. Below is the full set, how the rest of the symbol is assembled around it, why the same contract turns up in more than one symbol format, and why a product with a code available for every month may have only five contracts listed at once.

What are the twelve futures month codes?

Sierra Chart's documentation publishes the whole set in one table and attributes the codes to the exchanges, describing them as standard. Read as month to letter, it runs:

Four of these do most of the work for an index trader, because the Micro E-mini index products discussed below were certified on the March quarterly cycle alone. That leaves H, M, U and Z as the letters you actually meet, and Sierra Chart's continuous-contract months setting gives HMUZ as its own example of such a list — the letters typed one after another with nothing between them, one per quarter.

The letters are not an abbreviation scheme you can reason your way into. J is April, not January. M is June, not March, and March is H. The only reliable approach is to keep the table to hand until the four or five you actually trade become automatic.

This one table is also the reference everything else points at. Sierra Chart's symbol settings point back at it rather than restating the letters: the setting for which months a futures product has contracts for takes single letters and cross-references that section, and so does the setting that builds a continuous chart. Learn the twelve once and you have the vocabulary every other screen assumes you already know.

How do you read a full futures symbol?

A futures symbol is a product root, then the month letter, then the year. Sierra Chart's documentation describes a standard futures symbol as one that names "a specific delivery month and year", and its own example is ESZ14 — the December 2014 expiry of the S&P 500 mini contract. Elsewhere in the same vendor's documentation, ESZ19 is used to show that the root underneath a dated symbol is just ES.

Take that apart and the three fields are obvious once you know they are there:

• ES — the product. A root is the market, not the contract.
• Z — December, from the table above.
• 19 or 14 — the year, as two digits.

Which means a symbol carries no information about whether the contract is alive. ESZ14 is a well-formed symbol for something that stopped trading years ago, and Sierra Chart's continuous-contract feature is built on exactly that: the page says the feature depends on having history for contracts that have already expired, and that its own data services are what supply it. What determines whether you can trade a symbol is the exchange's listing schedule, covered below, not whether the symbol parses.

If you want the products and tick values on the other side of those roots, our tradable instruments table lists each contract we support with its tick size and tick value.

Why does my platform write the same contract differently?

Because the month letter is the piece the exchanges standardised, and the fields around it are not. Sierra Chart's documentation is explicit that Rithmic writes single-digit years in its symbols rather than two or four digits, which makes the same December contract a different string depending on which service is feeding the chart.

The same vendor's symbol-settings documentation shows a third shape entirely: ES-202509-GLOBEX, an example symbol with no month letter in it at all — six digits sit where the letter and year would be, and an exchange name follows. Its pattern-matching syntax uses # to stand for any digit, so that symbol is matched by ES-######-GLOBEX — which tells you the format is regular, just not the format anyone learning month codes expects.

This is not only cosmetic. Sierra Chart documents a hard consequence of the single-digit year: on its continuous-contract charts, symbols carrying two or more year digits reach back up to 50 years on daily charts and 15 on intraday, while single-digit-year symbols are capped at 5 years either way, and the feature is listed as unsupported on Rithmic for that reason. A convention about how a year is written turns into a limit on how much history you can load.

The practical habit is to read the symbol your own front end shows rather than the one you expect. Our four supported platforms all connect through Rithmic, which is the service Sierra Chart names for the single-digit year.

Why doesn't every contract list all twelve months?

Because the exchange decides which months to list, and nothing in the contract's rule text obliges it to list twelve. The four Micro E-mini rulebook chapters that CME and CBOT filed with the CFTC in April 2019 each leave both the hours of trading and the months of delivery to be determined by the Exchange — the rule reserves the decision rather than fixing a cycle.

What each product actually gets is set in its listing schedule, and two filings show how far apart those can be:

Both schedules are what those filings certified on those dates, so treat them as the shape of the thing rather than today's chain. The point is the contrast. On the quarterly cycle in the left column there is no August contract to buy, because none is listed, and four letters cover everything. The monthly schedule in the right column needs all twelve.

A third pattern shows up in the CFTC's worked example of how to read a futures price table. The example is a CBOT corn table, and its maturity rows run May, July, Sept and Dec of one year, then March, May, July and Dec of the next — five distinct months, H, K, N, U and Z, and no June row anywhere. The page offers it as an illustration of price reporting rather than as a certified listing schedule, but the letters in it are neither the quarterly four nor all twelve.

What do front month, spot month and back months mean?

These are the names for which listed month you are in, and the CFTC glossary defines each in its own entry. The front month entry is whichever listed contract sits nearest, which the glossary calls the spot or a nearby delivery month. The spot month is the contract reaching maturity and becoming deliverable inside the present calendar month; the same entry gives current delivery month as a synonym. Back months are the delivery months other than spot or front, deferred being the alternative name in that entry, and forward months are contracts trading now whose delivery falls further out.

The glossary's contract month entry is a pointer to delivery month, which it defines as the month a contract matures in and in which delivery can settle it, or else the month a delivery period starts. That is worth reading twice if you trade cash-settled index products, because the vocabulary of the whole market comes from physical delivery even where no delivery happens.

One dated example makes the distinction concrete. The April 2019 Micro E-mini filing puts the last trading day on the third Friday of the delivery month, with the expiring contract stopping at 8:30 a.m. Central. Up to that Friday, Z is the front month; after it, Z is history and H is the front month. Nothing about the code changed — the calendar moved. Our post on when futures contracts roll over covers the separate question of when volume actually migrates.

Does the month code change which market I am trading?

Yes. Each listed month is quoted on its own and carries its own open interest, and the month code is how you choose between them. The CFTC's guide to reading a futures price table shows this directly: every maturity row has its own open, high, low and settlement price, open interest is given maturity by maturity as the count of contracts still outstanding in that month, and the months are combined only in the line at the foot of the table, where the open int figure totals every contract month at the close of the session.

That is why the front month and a deferred month can look like different instruments on a chart. They are quoted independently, and each row's settlement price is one the exchange computes from that contract's own range of closing prices rather than reading off a single last trade — the same page notes that settle and closing price are often used as synonyms but can in fact differ.

For a day trader the consequence is narrow: be in the month the volume is in. Getting the letter wrong does not produce an error, because a symbol for a deferred or long-expired month is still valid. What Sierra Chart says you see instead is the chart itself: across the stretch when that month was not the active contract, its bars tend to come out looking incomplete and thin on volume. The figure a price table reports maturity by maturity is open interest, which is where the concentration in a market shows up.

What this means on a funded account

On a simulated funded account the month code matters at exactly two moments: when you first add the symbol, and on the days around expiry. Pick the wrong letter on day one and you can spend a week in a thinly traded deferred contract while believing you are in the lead month, because the symbol is valid either way. The tell is the chart, as described above, rather than a warning message.

Three things make it routine. Check which contract month your platform has defaulted to rather than assuming, and read the string as it is written rather than as you expect it: the platforms here run on Rithmic, whose symbols Sierra Chart describes as carrying a single-digit year. Know the cycle for what you trade: on a March-quarterly product H, M, U and Z are the only letters there are, while a monthly-listed contract works through all twelve. And know your own last trading day, because holding a futures contract to expiration is a different problem from rolling early.

Which contracts you can select in the first place is set out in the help center's instruments article, and if you are choosing between contract sizes on the same index, our comparison of Micro E-mini and E-mini futures covers what changing the root actually does to the value of a tick.

FAQ

What does U mean in a futures symbol?

U is September, in the standard set of month codes published in Sierra Chart's documentation. So ESU25 is the September 2025 expiry of that product, and because September is one of the four months in the March quarterly cycle used by the index products discussed above, U is one of the four letters an index trader meets most. The neighbouring letters are easy to misread: V is October and Q is August.

What is the difference between the contract month and the front month?

The CFTC glossary's entry for "contract month" points at delivery month, which it defines as the month a contract matures in and in which delivery can settle it, or else the month a delivery period starts. The front month is not a month of the year at all; it is a position in the queue. The glossary's front month entry is whichever listed contract sits nearest, the spot or a nearby delivery month. The front month therefore changes as contracts expire, while a contract month never does.

Are futures month codes the same on every platform?

The twelve letters are documented by Sierra Chart as standard codes attributed to the exchanges. The rest of the symbol is not standard. The same vendor records that symbols from Rithmic carry a single-digit year rather than a two- or four-digit one, which is why it caps continuous-contract history at 5 years on that service, and its settings documentation uses an example symbol, ES-202509-GLOBEX, with no month letter in it at all.

How many contract months are listed at the same time?

It depends entirely on the product, because the exchange sets the listing schedule. The April 2019 submission for the Micro E-mini index futures, CBOT 19-140, set the schedule as the nearest consecutive months of the March quarterly cycle, and put up five delivery months at initial listing for the S&P 500, Nasdaq-100 and Russell 2000 versions and four for the Dow one. NYMEX's October 2018 filing for WTI Houston Crude Oil futures listed monthly contracts covering the current year plus the following three calendar years. Both are the schedules certified on those dates, so check the live chain.