Payment retry

Many declines are temporary, such as insufficient funds or an issuer system issue, so the same card may succeed a few days later. Billing systems retry on a schedule: a fixed one (for example after 3, 5 and 7 days) or an adaptive one that picks times based on decline codes and patterns. Stripe’s Smart Retries, for example, default to up to 8 retries within 2 weeks for new accounts, and Adyen offers Auto Rescue.

Retries have limits. Card networks cap how often a single charge can be reattempted, and issuers can treat excessive retries as fraud; Stripe recommends no more than eight retries for a charge. Hard declines, such as a stolen card, should not be retried at all.

Retries work best with customer messages: a retry can succeed only if the card can pay, while an email or in-app notice gets a new card when it cannot.