# Pause or resume a subscription (/platforms/subscriptions/customize/pause-resume)

Learn how to pause or resume subscriptions with PayPal, providing flexibility for customers and managing payments and outstanding balances effectively.



With subscription services, you may encounter situations where consumers want to pause their subscription service for a period of time, such as when pausing cable service or a gym subscription during a vacation. Providing this ability helps you reduce customer churn.

You can also use this functionality as a "soft cancellation": when a consumer wants to stop their subscription, you can mark it inactive by pausing it and allowing it to be reactivated later. This saves consumers from having to go through the sign-up steps needed to re-subscribe from a [hard cancellation](/api/subscriptions/v1/subscriptions-cancel).

When a subscription is paused, or soft-canceled, PayPal will stop processing payments until it is reactivated. You can still recover any outstanding balances during the pause.

## Pausing subscriptions [#pausing-subscriptions]

To pause a customer subscription, copy the following code and modify it.

### Sample request [#sample-request]

API endpoint used: [Suspend subscription](/api/subscriptions/v1/subscriptions-suspend)

<div className="pl-[1.625rem]" />

```bash lineNumbers
curl -v -X POST https://api-m.sandbox.paypal.com/v1/billing/subscriptions/I-BW452GLLEP1G/suspend
-H "PayPal-Auth-Assertion: AUTH-ASSERTION" /
-H "Content-Type: application/json"
-H "Authorization: Bearer ACCESS-TOKEN"
-d '{
  "reason": "Customer-requested pause"
}'
```

### Modify the code [#modify-the-code]

* Access-Token - replace `ACCESS-TOKEN` with your access token.
* Subscription ID - In the URI for the API call, replace the sample ID with the ID for the subscription you want to update. In this example, the subscription ID is `I-BW452GLLEP1G`.
* Reason - Enter the reason for pausing or suspending the subscription as a string. Here, the reason is `Customer-requested pause`.

## Resume subscriptions [#resume-subscriptions]

To resume a paused customer subscription, copy the sample below, and modify it in the same way as described in Pausing subscriptions.

### Sample request [#sample-request-1]

API endpoint used: [Activate subscription](/api/subscriptions/v1/subscriptions-activate).

<div className="pl-[1.625rem]" />

```bash lineNumbers
curl -v -X POST https://api-m.sandbox.paypal.com/v1/billing/subscriptions/I-BW452GLLEP1G/activate
-H "PayPal-Auth-Assertion: AUTH-ASSERTION" /
-H "Content-Type: application/json"
-H "Authorization: Bearer ACCESS-TOKEN"
-d '{
  "reason": "Reactivating on customer request"
}'
```