So I just tried to make a one time payment, with a card I've never used on EZPass before to see if my balance will update right away and I got this message:
>Thank you for using E-ZPass! Your payment has been credited to your account and will be available for toll usage in 48 hours. If you have an email address on file, you will receive a confirmation email for this transaction. Please print this page for your records. View printer friendly version.
It does say two days to process payment!
But when I checked my toll balance the amount I charged is already added to the toll balance, so I actually CAN use it right away despite what it says.
In fact, in December I've had two EZPass autofills happen on consecutive days (I just checked) and unless I am mistaken that's impossible if the first payment took two days before I could drain it a second time to trigger a second auto payment.
So it looks like it happens at their discretion? It says it takes two days, in my experience it is immediate.
My EZPass account is 15+ years old, for what its worth. 15-20 or whatever years ago I set the auto-refill to be double the toll of the road I regularly took at the time so I'd never run out. Well now I've moved hundreds of miles away so my roads are different and the tolls on that road have more than doubled since then anyways. But I never changed my EZPass setting because it was never a problem!
I got 4 tickets when I drove up to Maine during the summer. Luckily, since it autopayed AFTER that day driving up it was full for the ride back.
Want another awesome EZPass story? They have a version with a switch so you can ride HOV if you have 3 people in the car in certain circumstances. So I got one. Since I didn't actually use that feature in the first 30 or 60 days or whatever they told me I had to send it back.