How many times will Stripe retry a payment?

Smart Retries: attempts within a window

With Smart Retries, Stripe picks the moment of each retry with a model trained on payment signals. You set a number of attempts and a maximum duration: 1 week, 2 weeks, 3 weeks, 1 month or 2 months. Stripe's recommended default is 8 tries within 2 weeks (Stripe docs).

The setting lives in the Dashboard under Billing → Revenue recovery → Retries. For one-off invoices, it's under Settings → Billing → Invoices.

Custom schedule: up to three retries

If you turn Smart Retries off, you can define a custom schedule of up to three retries, each set as a number of days after the previous attempt.

When Stripe doesn't retry at all

• No payment method is available.
• The issuer returned a hard decline code (the nine codes listed in our decline codes guide).
• The card was issued in India (recurring-payment rules).

For hard declines the attempts keep being scheduled and attempt_count keeps increasing, but no charge is attempted until a new payment method is detected.

When retries run out

You choose what happens to the subscription after the last attempt: cancel it, mark it unpaid, or leave it past_due. See past_due vs unpaid for the difference.

What retries don't do

A retry never tells the customer anything. A customer whose card expired can be retried eight times without ever learning they need to update it. That's why retries and dunning emails work together: retries for the declines that clear by themselves, emails for the ones that need the customer.