HTTP 402 Payment Required — What It Means
What HTTP status code 402 Payment Required means, when servers return it, and how to handle it correctly.
Published September 23, 2026
HTTP 402 Payment Required — Reserved for future use in the HTTP specification.
Key points
- Originally reserved for digital payment systems, but never formally standardized for that purpose
- Some modern APIs repurpose it to indicate a required payment or an exceeded free-tier usage limit
- Rarely seen in typical web applications