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Why is a payment rejected?

This documentation is intended for integrators. If you are a buyer and your payment was declined when using Mercado Pago, please check this article in our Help Center for guidance on how to proceed.

Payment declines are a reality in the world of online sales and can happen for various reasons. A payment may be declined due to:

An error with the payment method;
Incorrect information entered by the customer;
Card with insufficient funds;
Violation of necessary security requirements;
Suspicious movements indicating fraud risk;
Communication issues between acquirers and sub-acquirers.

You can find information and check the status of a payment via API through the endpoint Get order by IDAPI. The transactions.payments.status field indicates whether the payment was approved or not, while the transactions.payments.status_detail field provides more details, including reasons for decline.

curl
...
"transactions": {
    "payments": [
      {
        "id": "PAY01J67CQQH5904WDBVZEM4JMEP3",
        "amount": "24.90",
        "reference_id": "01JEVQM899NWSQC4FYWWW7KTF9",
        "status": "failed",
        "status_detail": "insufficient_amount",
...

You can also find more information about payments in your Mercado Pago account activity.

Declines due to input errors

Declines by the issuing bank

When making a credit or debit card payment, for example, the issuing bank may decline the charge for different reasons, such as passed expiration date, insufficient balance or credit limit, disabled card, or card blocked for online purchases. In these cases, the transactions.payments.status_detail field may return:

required_call_for_authorize
card_disabled
cc_rejected_duplicated_payment
insufficient_amount
invalid_installments
max_attempts_exceeded

Declines due to fraud prevention

We monitor transactions in real-time looking to recognize suspicious patterns and resources that indicate a fraud attempt. This is done by both Mercado Pago's algorithms and banks, all to minimize chargebacks as much as possible.

When our fraud prevention system detects a suspicious payment, the transactions.payments.status_detail field may return:

high_risk
rejected_by_issuer
cc_rejected_other_reason

In some cases, the high_risk response may occur when two consecutive payments are made with the same items or with very similar parameters (such as identical payer and items values in both payments made). This can trigger the anti-fraud engine, which may interpret the attempt as duplicated and reject it as a precaution. As a consequence, subsequent payments may be temporarily blocked. It is recommended to implement controls to prevent immediate new attempts with the same payment data.

The cc_rejected_other_reason response is a status sent by the issuing bank. Although it does not specify the reason for the rejection, it is an estimate of fraud risk. However, there are other reasons why this status may be returned. If you are unsure, it is recommended to choose another payment method or contact the bank.

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