Soft Decline
A soft decline is an issuer's refusal of a payment for a reason that may not apply next time — insufficient funds, the issuer's system unavailable, a velocity limit, a fraud rule, a request for authentication — as distinct from a hard decline, which is final. Soft declines are most e-commerce declines and the whole of decline recovery: retried, re-routed or resubmitted with a challenge, half become approvals.
- Also known as
- Temporary decline, Retriable decline, Soft decline code
- Used at
- every authorisation response; the decline code and the schemes' category tables say whether a decline is soft; retry engines act on it
- Binding
- the schemes' reattempt rules allow retries of soft codes within limits (Visa: 15 in 30 days); a soft decline that asks for authentication ("SCA required", code 1A on Visa) should be resubmitted with a 3-D Secure challenge rather than retried blind
- Typical soft codes
- insufficient funds (51), do not honour (05 — the catch-all, mostly soft), issuer or switch inoperative (91), exceeds withdrawal or velocity limit (61, 65), suspected fraud (59, in some issuers' usage), SCA required (1A / soft decline for authentication), timeout
- Typical share
- 70–85% of e-commerce declines are soft; recovery rates of 40–60% with tuned retries; "SCA required" declines recover at over 70% when resubmitted with a challenge
- Parties
- the issuer (which codes the decline), the merchant and its PSP (which decide how to respond), the schemes (which set the codes and the rules), and the customer, who may need to authenticate
How a soft decline works in practice
A €60 online purchase is declined with code 51, insufficient funds. The customer's balance is €40 today; on Friday it will be €1,200. A blind retry tomorrow fails; a retry on Friday morning succeeds, and the merchant's retry engine knew that from the issuer's patterns. A different transaction is declined with code 1A: the issuer wants strong customer authentication, because the acquirer requested an exemption the issuer did not accept. This is not a refusal of the payment but of the exemption; the correct response is to resubmit immediately with a 3-D Secure challenge, and the customer approves in her banking app. A third is declined with code 91, issuer unavailable — retry in a minute, or route through another acquirer whose connection to the issuer is up.
The codes are the map. "Do not honour", the commonest code, is the issuer declining without saying why — usually a fraud rule or a limit — and it is soft, retriable within limits and often recovered on a second attempt with better data. The merchant's engine classifies each code, decides the action (retry later, retry now via another route, resubmit with authentication, or stop), and stays within the schemes' counts. Fraud teams read soft declines too: a burst of code 05 on one device is a card-testing attack in progress.
For a payments company the soft-decline recovery rate is a product metric it sells and a buyer tests.
Example
A marketplace's checkout sees 14% declines, of which 78% are soft: 05 do not honour (45% of declines), 51 insufficient funds (18%), 1A SCA required (10%), 91 issuer unavailable (5%). Its payments team builds responses: 1A resubmitted at once with a challenge — 74% approved; 91 re-routed instantly through the second acquirer — 60% approved; 05 retried once immediately with full 3DS data and then per the retry schedule — 35% approved; 51 retried on the model's schedule — 48% approved over ten days. Overall: 42% of soft declines recovered, the effective approval rate up from 86% to 91%, and the fraud team's velocity rule on 05 bursts stops three card-testing attacks in the first month.
Common mistakes
- Treating "SCA required" as a decline and losing a customer who would have tapped "approve". - Retrying soft declines on a fixed schedule instead of the issuer's pattern. - Ignoring "issuer unavailable" as unrecoverable when a second route would take it. - Reading "do not honour" as hard, or as soft without limit, and paying reattempt fees. - Not distinguishing a soft decline on a stolen card (which the fraud team should see) from one on an empty account.