What Visa and Mastercard Charge You to Retry a Decline

The never-retry codes, the per-card limits, and where the fees show up on your statement.

Retrying a declined card feels free. It isn't. Visa and Mastercard both bill merchants for retries they shouldn't have sent, and both have tightened their rules in the last 18 months.

We covered how to sort declines into retry, ask the customer, or stop in Not Every Card Decline Is a No. This post is narrower: what each network actually charges for, what changed recently, and where those charges show up.

Visa: never-approve codes and a per-card cap

Never-approve codes. Visa groups decline codes into categories. The first category covers declines where the issuer will never approve the card: lost or stolen card, closed account, pick-up. Any reattempt after one of these codes is billed.

The retry cap. Every other decline can be retried, up to 20 times on the same card in a rolling 30-day window. Attempts past that are billed. The cap was 15 until May 2025, and Visa now counts customer-initiated and merchant-initiated attempts separately.

Mastercard: a daily cap and two stop codes

The retry cap. Mastercard allows up to 10 retries on the same card in 24 hours and 35 in a rolling 30 days. Attempts past either limit are billed.

Advice codes 03 and 21. Mastercard sends merchant advice codes with many declines. Code 03 means do not try again. Code 21 means the cardholder cancelled the payment. In the US and Canada, if a card-not-present payment is declined with either code and that same card at the same merchant was declined with one of them in the previous 30 days, the attempt is billed.

Before January 2026, the rule only applied when the amount matched, so some systems got around it by retrying for a slightly different amount. That no longer works. Changing the amount doesn't reset anything.

Limits and fee amounts vary by region, and some processors set stricter limits of their own. Check your provider's documentation for the exact numbers that apply to you.

Where the fees show up

These are network fees, so they land on your processing statement, usually as excessive reattempt lines for Visa and excessive authorization lines for Mastercard. Each one is small. On a large recurring billing book, they add up without anyone noticing, because nobody reads that section of the statement.

If you're on flat or blended pricing, you may not see them itemized at all. Ask your provider whether they pass these fees through and how they report them.

Why the fees matter more than their size

A retry fee means your system retried something the network told it not to, or kept hammering a card past the limit. Retry logic that ignores the codes in one direction usually ignores them in the other, so the declines that could be recovered probably aren't being timed well either.

That makes the fee lines a useful check. Pull last quarter's statements and look for them. If they're there, it's worth a look at how your retries are set up. It also belongs on the monthly decline report, next to the approval rate.

The Takeaway

The fee for a bad retry is small. What it tells you isn't. If it's on your statement, the network has already spotted a problem with your retry logic that your own reporting missed.