How does the excessive retry fee work?
Schemes group decline responses by whether a retry can succeed, then count attempts on the same card. Visa sorts response codes into four categories. Adyen’s documentation says that after a Category 1 decline the issuer will not approve and Visa charges for any retry, while Categories 2 to 4 cover declines the issuer cannot approve at this time, declines based on the details provided, and generic codes such as 05 do not honor. For those, PayPal’s May 2026 summary and TabaPay’s documentation put the limit at 20 reattempts in 30 days. PayPal lists Visa’s fee as USD 0.10 per excess domestic reattempt and USD 0.25 cross-border. Mastercard, according to PayPal, allows 10 retries in 24 hours and 35 in 30 days before charging for each further retry, for example EUR 0.55 in Europe.
Why does it matter?
The fee per attempt is small, but it applies to traffic that produces no revenue. As an illustrative example: a subscription merchant retries 2,000 cards that received a Visa Category 1 decline twice each. At USD 0.10 per domestic attempt, that is 4,000 attempts and USD 400 in fees with no chance of approval.
How do merchants stay under the limits?
By reading the decline before retrying. Category 1 codes and Mastercard advice codes 03 and 21 should end retries on that card and lead to a request for new details. Temporary declines should be retried on a schedule rather than in a burst. A retry policy needs to count every attempt on the card, including ones sent through a second provider or a dunning process.
Where does Omno use it?
If a provider is unavailable or rejects the request, Omno moves the payment to the next PSP in the merchant’s routing rule. The routing-decision log records every attempt with its decline code, so a merchant can check attempts against scheme rules.