HTTP New Added 28 August 2026

402 Payment Required

Reserved in the original HTTP specification and now used by many SaaS APIs to signal that the account is unpaid, out of credit, or over its plan limit. The response body carries the vendor-specific detail.

Quick fix

Read the commands before running them. Anything that restarts a service, deletes data or changes permissions should be tried on a non-production system first.

Quick fix

# Always read the body. The status alone tells you nothing actionable
curl -i https://api.example.com/v1/resource

# Handle it as non-retryable in client code
if (res.status === 402) {
  // do not retry; alert billing, surface to the user
}

# Add a low-balance alert on the provider side before it hits production

How to diagnose HTTP errors

HTTP status codes are a first classification, not a diagnosis. The essential split: 4xx means the request was wrong (fix the client), 5xx means the server failed to fulfil a valid request (fix the server). The subtlety is that reverse proxies and CDNs generate their own 5xx responses. A 502 or 504 from nginx tells you about nginx's relationship with the upstream, not about your application code.

If the quick fix above does not resolve it, work through these steps. They apply to this whole class of error, not just to this one message, which is usually what saves the time.

Capture the full exchange with curl -v or curl -sD - -o /dev/null. Response headers frequently name the component that generated the error (Server:, Via:, X-Cache:).
Determine whether the response came from your application or from something in front of it. Add a unique header in your app and check whether it survives; if it is missing, a proxy answered.
For 502/504, check the upstream directly, bypassing the proxy. If the upstream is healthy, the problem is proxy timeouts, buffer sizes, or DNS re-resolution.
Follow redirects explicitly with curl -IL to catch loops. A redirect loop is usually an HTTPS-terminating proxy that does not forward X-Forwarded-Proto.
Correlate the request with server logs using a request ID. Guessing from the status code alone is the slowest way to debug HTTP.

Tools worth reaching for

curl -v / -IL
browser devtools Network tab
access logs
tcpdump / Wireshark
httpstat

Authoritative references

Primary documentation for this error, worth reading before applying any fix in production.

developer.mozilla.org

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This entry is maintained by hand. If the fix is out of date, incomplete, or you have a better one, email a correction and it will be reviewed.