Chargebacks with Recurly: what Recurly shows and where you answer

Recurly bills your customers, but the card payment itself runs through a gateway such as Stripe or Adyen. When a customer disputes a charge, that split decides everything: the dispute is opened and answered at the gateway, and Recurly records the consequences on the invoice and the subscription. This guide explains what Recurly shows, what it does on its own, and where you actually respond.

It sticks to Recurly’s own documentation: chargeback management for cards, chargebacks and late failures for direct debit, the Stripe gateway page, the transactions dashboard and subscription notifications (all accessed November 2026). Where Recurly’s docs are silent, we say so.

Who does what

Step	Where it happens
The cardholder disputes the charge	Their bank, then the card network
The dispute is opened and you are notified	Your gateway
You submit evidence or accept	Your gateway, in its dashboard or API
The bank decides	Bank and network
The invoice and subscription are updated	Recurly, if chargeback management is on

Recurly’s chargeback page is explicit about the response: the merchant disputes or accepts the chargeback through their gateway. Recurly does not submit evidence for you.

Recurly’s native chargeback management for cards

Availability

Per Recurly’s docs, native card chargeback management is in early access: you ask Recurly Support or your account manager to enable it. It is available on three gateways:

• Adyen: enable the Adyen webhook types CHARGEBACK, SECOND_CHARGEBACK and DISPUTE_DEFENSE_PERIOD_ENDED. Recurly notes that some Adyen statuses only arrive after you act in Adyen’s dashboard.
• Chase Orbital: Chase gives Recurly access to its chargeback file reports using Recurly’s Partner ID; nothing is set up inside Recurly.
• Stripe: chargeback status and reason code appear in the Recurly Admin UI, and Recurly refers you to Stripe’s reason codes for their meaning. Recurly’s Stripe page says the webhook events it uses need no extra configuration in Stripe.

For other gateways, the docs we found do not describe native chargeback handling, and at least one gateway page (Ebanx) says chargebacks are not reflected. Check your gateway’s page in Recurly’s docs.

What Recurly does, and when

Recurly acts when the chargeback reaches a final state: accepted, lost or expired. At that point it receives a “Chargeback Completed” event from the gateway and:

1. creates an external refund invoice, with an origin of Chargeback;
2. creates a chargeback transaction, which shows with the status Chargeback in the transactions dashboard;
3. expires the associated subscription. Another part of Recurly’s docs says affected subscriptions “can be” expired automatically depending on your settings, so check how yours are configured.

Two consequences follow. First, nothing changes in Recurly while the dispute is open; the subscription keeps renewing unless you act. Second, Recurly’s docs we found do not describe what happens in Recurly when you win a dispute, since the actions are tied to accepted, lost and expired. If you win, check the invoice and subscription yourself.

One chargeback system at a time

Recurly supports third-party chargeback tools as an alternative, but only one system can be active per site. When a third-party tool is enabled, Recurly stops processing gateway chargeback events for the supported gateways. Choose one source of truth.

Direct debit is different

For bank debits, Recurly’s direct debit page describes chargebacks and late failures, with GoCardless as the main example and two modes:

• Default mode: when Recurly receives the chargeback webhook, it creates a refund transaction itself.
• Manual mode: Recurly sends a webhook notification for each chargeback and takes no action; you decide what to do. In this mode the Chargeback status filter on the transactions page returns nothing, because no chargeback refund transactions are created.

Recurly notes that the gateway’s Webhook Options must be enabled for automated handling to work. In both modes it sends a webhook for every chargeback event.

Where you answer: the gateway

Since the response happens at the gateway, your process there decides the outcome. If your gateway is Stripe, we explain the dispute lifecycle, evidence fields and deadlines in how to win chargebacks on Stripe. Whatever the gateway, the evidence for a subscription business comes largely from places Recurly can help with:

• Subscription history: when the customer signed up, what plan, how many renewals they paid without dispute. Recurly’s account and invoice pages hold this.
• Cancellation record: if the dispute says “I cancelled”, Recurly has canceled_at and expires_at for the subscription, and the canceled notification you received. If there is no cancellation, that is evidence too.
• Terms shown at signup, including how to cancel and when renewals happen.
• Emails sent: invoice, renewal or dunning emails that went to the customer, from Recurly or from you.
• Usage: logins and activity in your product during the period charged. This lives in your systems, not in Recurly.
• Support conversations with the customer, from your help desk.

A process that works

1. Know your gateway’s support. Check whether your gateway is one of the three with native handling, and whether it is turned on for your site.
2. Get notified at the gateway, not at the end. Recurly acts at the final state; by then the evidence deadline has passed. Subscribe to dispute notifications in the gateway itself.
3. Decide what to do with the subscription right away. If the cardholder says the charge was not theirs, the next renewal on that card will probably be disputed too. Consider cancelling the subscription in Recurly while the dispute is open, rather than waiting for Recurly to expire it.
4. Gather evidence from Recurly and your own systems, then respond at the gateway before its deadline.
5. Reconcile at the end. When Recurly creates the refund invoice and chargeback transaction, check that the subscription state matches what you decided, and handle won disputes by hand.
6. Look for patterns. “Subscription cancelled” disputes point at a cancel process that is hard to find or not honored; “unrecognized” disputes point at your payment descriptor or missing renewal reminders.

Doing this with NoChurn

With Recurly, disputes come from the gateway behind it. If that gateway is Stripe or Braintree, NoChurn reads the dispute, gathers evidence automatically (cancel flow answers, emails NoChurn sent, usage you send by API, and conversations from a connected help desk, read only), and drafts a reply with AI that is sent to the gateway only after a person on your team reviews it. The bank’s decision, fees and deadlines stay with the gateway and the networks, and invoices and subscriptions stay in Recurly. NoChurn also adds cancel flows with a one-click cancel always visible, which helps prevent “I cancelled” disputes. See NoChurn + Recurly.