I've researched this a bit more and I will answer this myself to the best of my knowledge, just in cased others have the same question. "jnorris10" wrote : Am I only able to use CMT on "business methods"? Yes, since these are the only EJB3 interceptor points defined. "jnorris10" wrote : I often want to have private methods on a session bean that still have transactional semantics (ie: annotate them with @TransactionAttribute(...)). Can I not do this? Am I missing something? No, you can't do this because again only business methods (which are public among other things) are subject to CMT behavior because this is the specified point at which this EJB3 interceptor stack is tied in. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3957560#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...