# Payment failures and recovering balances (/platforms/subscriptions/customize/payment-failure-retry)



You can set payment failure thresholds for subscription plans and capture the outstanding balance for a subscription.

## 1. Payment failures [#1-payment-failures]

When a subscription exceeds the payment failure threshold:

* The subscription is suspended.
* If a payment fails, PayPal retries the payment every 5 days. PayPal retries the payment up to twice per billing cycle.
* If the second retry fails, PayPal counts this as a payment failure. The failed payment amount is added to the outstanding balance for the next billing cycle.

When you create your plan, you can set the value for the `payment_failure_threshold` in the `payment_preferences` object:

```text lineNumbers
"payment_preferences": {
        "auto_bill_outstanding": true,
        "payment_failure_threshold": 2
    }
```

### Example of payment failure threshold [#example-of-payment-failure-threshold]

The following example describes a payment failure threshold where:

* A streaming service costs $10 per month
* The payment failure threshold is set to `2`
* A subscriber pays on January 1 and is billed on the first of every month at 10:00 AM GMT.

In this example, PayPal can't pull funds from the subscriber on February 1. Paypal retries on February 5 and February 10. No funds are pulled. PayPal counts this as a payment failure. The outstanding amount against the subscription is $10.

$10 is added to the next billing cycle, so the subscriber is charged $20 on March 1. PayPal can't pull funds and reaches the payment failure threshold. The subscription is suspended.

The subscriber cancels the subscription with a $20 outstanding balance. PayPal stops retrying attempts for failed payments. You can settle offline or [capture the payment](/api/subscriptions/v1/subscriptions-capture).

## 2. Recover outstanding balance [#2-recover-outstanding-balance]

If the subscription has an outstanding balance, you can capture the balance. You can do this if the failure threshold is met and the subscription is suspended.

### Sample request [#sample-request]

In this example, the outstanding balance being captured is $20. You could also capture $10 of the balance now and the remaining $10 later.

```text lineNumbers
curl -v -X POST https://api-m.sandbox.paypal.com/v1/billing/subscriptions/I-BW452GLLEP1G/capture
-H "PayPal-Auth-Assertion: AUTH-ASSERTION"
-H "Content-Type: application/json"
-H "Authorization: Bearer ACCESS-TOKEN"
-H "PayPal-Request-Id: CAPTURE-160919-A0051"
-d '{
   "note": "Charging because the balance reached the limit",
   "capture_type": "OUTSTANDING_BALANCE",
   "amount": {
     "value": "20.00",
     "currency_code": "USD"
   }
 }'
```