Decline Code Translator

Soft and hard is the only distinction that matters

Every useful decision you make about a decline comes down to one question: could this same cardholder, on this same card, succeed later? A soft decline means yes. Insufficient funds, an issuer timeout, a velocity limit. A hard decline means no, and no amount of retrying changes it: closed account, stolen card, invalid PAN.

Getting this wrong is expensive in both directions. Retrying a hard decline burns authorisation attempts against scheme reattempt rules, which both Visa and Mastercard now police with fees. Abandoning a soft decline throws away revenue that would have been collected on a retry the next morning.

The retry reading in this table is conservative. It means "later, or with a changed request", never "resend this same message now". Immediately re-hitting a decline is the pattern the reattempt rules exist to stop.

05 is a junk drawer

05, do not honour, is the most common decline in card payments and it carries almost no information. It means the issuer declined and chose not to say why. That may be risk scoring, an internal limit, a fraud rule, or a system the issuer would rather not describe to a merchant.

This table marks it a soft decline. Plenty of 05s are risk decisions that clear on a different day, and treating every one as final throws away revenue a later attempt would have collected. What that does not license is resending the identical message now. The issuer has already answered and declined to say what would change its mind, and blind immediate reattempts are what the schemes' reattempt rules penalise. Later, or with something about the request changed.

Resist the temptation to show the cardholder a specific reason, too. You do not have one. "Your bank declined this. Try another card or contact them" is the honest message, and it is also the one least likely to be wrong.

Approved is narrower than it looks

00 is an approval. So are 08, 10, 11 and the effectively obsolete 16. But 85, which reads as no reason to decline, is not, and this table refuses to count it as one. It is the answer to a zero-amount account verification or an address-only check: nothing was wrong, and nothing was authorised either. On a message that did ask for money, reading 85 as an approval means shipping goods against a transaction that never captured.

Watch 10 as well. A partial approval is an approval for less than you asked for, and DE 4 in the response carries the amount actually granted. If your integration ignores that and reads only DE 39, you will record a full sale against a partial authorisation and discover the gap at settlement.

The code you receive is not always the code the issuer sent

A decline passes through the issuer, the scheme, your acquirer and possibly a gateway, and any of them may remap it. Acquirers routinely collapse issuer codes they consider ambiguous into 05, and gateways often translate the lot into their own vocabulary before you see it.

So when a code here does not match the behaviour you are observing, the table is not necessarily wrong. You may be reading someone's translation of the original. The 1987 action codes are the base every scheme started from, which makes them the right default reading and a poor substitute for your acquirer's own specification.

65 is the sharpest example. Its ISO meaning is an exceeded activity count, so waiting may help. After PSD2, Mastercard and others reuse it to mean strong customer authentication is required, where the fix is to re-attempt through 3-D Secure rather than to wait. Same two digits, opposite remedies, and nothing in the message tells you which you have.

Where it sits in the message

DE 39 in the response, two characters. Read it alongside DE 44, because an approval can arrive with a CVV mismatch beside it. The checks are independent, and the issuer will happily approve the funds while telling you the security code was wrong. Paste a whole response into the message decoder and both come out together, already resolved.