402 Payment Required

What does 402 Payment Required mean?

The request cannot be processed until payment is made. It belongs to the 4xx Client Error class, which means the request contains bad syntax or cannot be fulfilled. Something about the request needs to change.

When do APIs return 402?

A lapsed subscription, an exhausted credit balance, or a usage quota on a paid API tier. Long reserved for future use, it is now genuinely used by billing-aware APIs.

How to fix a 402 Payment Required

Check the billing status of the account behind the credentials. This is an account state problem, not a request problem — no amount of editing headers will clear it. The response body usually names the plan or balance at fault.

Reproduce a 402 response

The fastest way to understand a status code is to trigger one and read the full response. Open the API tester and send a request to https://httpbin.org/status/402 — you will see the 402 status along with every response header the server sent. Comparing those headers against a working request is often what reveals the cause.

When you are debugging a real endpoint, check the response headers as carefully as the body, and confirm you are using the right HTTP method for the operation.

Related 4xx status codes