I do now. Sorry I was so slow. I wasn't thinking about acc's having a mix of years. The tables I tested on allowed me to come to the wrong conclusion. You are right about the subquery getting executed repeatedly for each row retrieved in the main query. Could the acc_field condition be lifted out of the subquery and be part of the main query and the "like '5%'" be changed to "= '5'" and get the same results? Notice I'm not so sure about things now.