HTTP 402 Payment Required — Meaning, Causes & How to Fix

Code

402

Name

Payment Required

Class

4xx Client Error

Specification

RFC 9110 §15.5.3

Cacheable by default

Only with explicit Cache-Control / Expires

What HTTP 402 means

402 Payment Required is reserved for future use in the HTTP standard — it has no defined semantics. Some APIs and SaaS platforms use it anyway to say a subscription lapsed, a card was declined or a paid plan is needed.

Common causes

• An API account ran out of credits or its subscription expired.
• A payment provider signalling a failed charge.

How to fix it

For site owners

• If you use 402, document it and include a machine-readable reason in the body.
• For simple rate limits, 429 is the standard code.

For visitors & developers

• Check the billing status of your account with the API provider.

SEO impact

Pages that return 402 are not indexed. For paywalled articles, Google recommends serving 200 with paywall structured data rather than an error code.

Example 402 response

HTTP/1.1 402 Payment Required
Content-Type: application/json

{"error":"subscription_inactive"}

Related status codes

Check or look up another code

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