What is the difference between a soft and hard decline?

Soft Declines are temporary and retriable. These include things like insufficient funds or a processor timeout — issues that may resolve themselves within hours or days. Soft declines account for the vast majority of card-not-present payment failures, which is why retry strategy matters so much.

Hard Declines are permanent. A closed account, a stolen card, or a “do not honor” response won’t clear up with time. Retrying these transactions wastes resources and can flag your account with the card networks.

The key is treating each decline differently — and you can only do that if you have the data.