Understanding payment declines and how to help your customers

Last updated: August 17, 2026

Declines are a normal part of payment processing. Most of them originate on the customer's side and get resolved quickly by trying another card or payment method.

This article shows you where to find the reason behind each decline, what to tell your customer, and how to reduce declines over time.

Where to find the decline reason

In your dashboard

  1. Go to Payments.

  2. Find the payment with Rejected status.

  3. Select the payment to open its details.

  4. Review the Failure reason field.

This shows a plain-language explanation of why the payment was declined.

In the payments export

When you export payment data to CSV from the Payments section, the status_detail column carries the decline reason for each rejected payment. This is the fastest way to analyze patterns across many payments at once.

Common decline reasons in LATAM

Reason

What it means

What to tell your customer

Insufficient funds

The account doesn't have enough money to cover the payment.

"Your payment was declined for insufficient funds. Please check your account balance and try again, or use another payment method."

Card declined by the bank

The issuing bank rejected the transaction — fraud protection, international payments blocked, daily limits, or a card not enabled for online purchases.

"Your bank declined this payment. Please contact your bank to authorize the transaction and try again, or use another card or payment method."

Incorrect card details

The card number, expiration date or CVC was entered incorrectly.

"The card details entered don't match your bank's records. Please verify your card number, expiration date and security code, then try again."

Expired card

The card's expiration date has passed.

"Your card has expired. Please use your new card or a different payment method."

Card security restrictions

The bank's fraud protection flagged the transaction: first purchase with your business, payment from an unusual country, large amount, or several attempts in a short time.

"Your bank's security system flagged this transaction. Please contact your bank to authorize the payment and try again."

Daily limit exceeded

The customer reached the daily spending limit set by their bank.

"You've reached your daily spending limit. You can try again tomorrow, contact your bank to raise it temporarily, or use another payment method."

All six originate with the customer or their bank, so they're resolved on that side. Your role is to share the reason clearly and offer an alternative.

Soft declines and hard declines

The distinction determines whether a retry can succeed.

Soft declines are temporary, so an automatic retry has a real chance of going through: insufficient funds, daily limit exceeded, or a temporary error at the bank. For subscriptions, we retry these automatically 4 times over 10 days.

Hard declines are permanent and a retry won't change the outcome: stolen card, invalid card number, expired card, or an unsupported card type. Here your customer needs to update their payment method.

How to reduce declines

Offer several payment methods

Different methods work better for different customers. Enable more than one on your payment links so your customer always has an alternative at hand:

  • Cards — credit and debit

  • Bank transfers — PIX (Brazil), SPEI (Mexico), PSE (Colombia)

Rely on automatic retries

For recurring subscription charges we retry failed payments automatically, 4 times over 10 days. This covers the situations that resolve on their own: funds that arrive after payday, daily limits that reset, or a temporary issue at the bank.

Turn on the renewal reminder

The Subscription upcoming charge notification reaches your customer 72 hours before the renewal, so they can confirm their card is valid and their balance is ready. It includes a link to update the card before the charge.

You enable it in Settings → Notifications.

When to report a pattern to us

Individual declines are resolved by the customer with their bank, so reporting them one by one doesn't lead anywhere: issuers don't share enough technical detail for us to investigate a single case.

What is worth reporting is a pattern of 20 or more declines sharing the same reason, payment method, country or time window. That's the signal that points to something we can investigate.

To put the pattern together:

  1. Go to Payments and filter by Rejected status.

  2. Export the data to CSV.

  3. Review the status_detail column and identify what the cases have in common.

  4. Send it to support@rebill.com with the number of declines, the date range, the shared reason, the affected country or payment method, and the CSV attached.

The same export answers the useful questions: which reason is most frequent, which payment method concentrates the most declines, which country stands out, and whether the trend is moving.

Need help?

If you identify a pattern or have questions about a decline reason, contact us at support@rebill.com.