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Payments

Decline code

The reason an issuer gave for refusing a payment. The difference between a soft and a hard decline decides what to do next.

A decline code is the issuer’s stated reason for refusing an authorization.

Soft declines are temporary: insufficient funds, do not honour, issuer unavailable, velocity limits. These are worth retrying, and are where smart retries earn their name.

Hard declines are permanent: stolen card, closed account, invalid number. Retrying these is pointless, is often penalised by card networks, and can put your merchant account at risk. The correct response is to ask for a new payment method.

Codes are inconsistent across gateways and issuers, and the reason given is not always the real one, so treat categories rather than individual codes as the decision input.

Related terms

  • Smart retries Scheduling payment retries based on the decline reason, the card type and local timing rather than at fixed intervals.
  • Dunning The automated sequence of retries and reminders that recovers a failed recurring payment before the subscription is lost.
  • Authorization and capture Authorization reserves funds; capture takes them. The gap between the two is where a lot of billing logic lives.