402 Payment Required

What it means

HTTP 402 Payment Required was set aside for digital payment systems but never standardised into a single mechanism. A handful of APIs and services use it today to signal that access depends on payment — an unpaid invoice, an exhausted quota on a paid plan, or a wallet with insufficient funds. Outside those specific systems it is rare.

When it happens

It happens mostly with commercial APIs that gate usage behind billing: a SaaS endpoint returning 402 when the account is past due, or a metered service cutting off a client that has run out of paid credit.

How to fix it

• Settle the outstanding payment or top up the account the API is billing against.
• Check the response body or docs for the exact billing condition, since 402 has no single standard meaning.
• For your own API, document precisely what 402 represents so clients can handle it.

SEO impact

None for normal pages. It is an API and billing response, not something used for indexable content.