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What does the Stripe issuer_not_available decline code mean?
issuer_not_available Usually resolved by retryingWhat it means
Stripe's description: "The card issuer couldn't be reached, so the payment couldn't be authorized." This isn't the bank saying no; it's the bank's systems being unreachable at the exact moment of the attempt, whether from a brief outage, a timeout, or network congestion between Stripe and the issuing bank.
Will retries fix it?
Usually, yes. Stripe's own recommended next step says it directly: "Attempt the payment again." A moment of unavailability on the bank's end is, by nature, temporary. This is one of the cleaner examples of a decline that Smart Retries is well suited to handle without any merchant or customer involvement.
What you should do
In most cases, nothing, at least not right away. Let Smart Retries make its automatic attempts, since that's exactly the scenario it's designed for. Only if a specific charge keeps failing with this code well past Stripe's normal retry window is it worth following up with the customer at all.
Where Valkyrie helps: this is a case where we deliberately do less, not more. We exclude issuer_not_available declines that are still within Stripe's own retry window from our outreach, since billing you for something Smart Retries was already going to fix wouldn't be fair. We only step in if it's genuinely stuck.
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Questions, answered
Is issuer_not_available about my Stripe account or the customer's bank?
The customer's bank. Stripe's description says the card issuer couldn't be reached, which points to a connectivity or availability problem on the issuing bank's systems at the moment of the charge attempt, unrelated to anything in your Stripe account.
Does this need customer outreach?
Usually not. Stripe's own next step is to attempt the payment again, which is exactly what Smart Retries is built to do automatically. Customer outreach is really a fallback for the rare cases where it's still failing after retries.
How is this different from do_not_honor or generic_decline?
Those two codes mean the bank actively declined the charge for an unspecified reason. issuer_not_available means the bank couldn't be reached at all to make a decision, which is a more clearly technical, temporary condition.
Source: Stripe decline codes documentation, checked October 2026.