---
language: en
title: "HTTP 402"
description: "HTTP 402 is the Payment Required code, reserved in RFC 9110. Learn about its uses in automated billing and why the response does not confirm payment."
canonical: "https://tropk.ai/en/resources/glossary/http-402"
last_modified: "2026-10-12T16:10:53.310Z"
---

# HTTP 402

Reviewed on 2026-10-07.

## What it means

HTTP 402 is a response code called Payment Required. Section 15.5.3 of RFC 9110 reserves it for future use. Specific services may use this code in billing flows, such as Cloudflare's Pay Per Crawl, but the number alone does not define how to find prices, authenticate customers, or settle payments.

## Why it matters for marketing

A content team may encounter HTTP 402 while investigating why a tool cannot retrieve a particular page. The code points them to examine the commercial terms of that implementation. For marketing, this helps avoid treating an access barrier as a lack of editorial interest and prevents interpreting any 402 as proof that revenue was earned from the site's content.

## Example in practice

Imagine an agency trying to retrieve an industry report through an authorized integration with Pay Per Crawl. The hypothetical response contains HTTP 402 and the [crawler](/en/resources/glossary/crawler)-price header, which gives the report's price. The agency checks its budget and decides not to repeat the request with payment intent. The report remains unavailable in this [retrieval](/en/resources/glossary/information-retrieval), and no purchase has taken place.

## How to apply or verify

The technical team should preserve the URL, status, headers, body, and response time, and identify which service produced it. Check the flow's documentation before repeating the request. In the Cloudflare example, price and payment intent have their own headers. To confirm a charge, look for the corresponding successful event and its reconciliation, not just the occurrence of code 402.

## Important distinctions

HTTP 402 is not a universal payment protocol and does not necessarily mean a transfer failed. Cloudflare also lets users configure it as a blocking response, subject to plan-specific conditions. HTTP 401 involves credentials, while HTTP 403 indicates a refusal to fulfill the request in HTTP semantics. The commercial interpretation of 402 depends on the implementation, including the body and headers.

## Sources and references

- [RFC 9110: HTTP Semantics — §15.5.3](<https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9110.html#section-15.5.3>) — IETF / RFC Editor
- [Introducing pay per crawl: Enabling content owners to charge AI crawlers for access](<https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pay-per-crawl/>) — Cloudflare
- [Manage AI crawlers](<https://developers.cloudflare.com/ai-crawl-control/features/manage-ai-crawlers/>) — Cloudflare

## Continue a leitura

- [Pay-per-crawl](</en/resources/glossary/pay-per-crawl>)
- [Really Simple Licensing](</en/resources/glossary/really-simple-licensing>)
- [HTTP Status](</en/resources/glossary/http-status>)

## About the author

[Vinicius Pacheco](</en/team/vinicius-pacheco>)

Responsible for Tropk’s technical content, focusing on crawling, indexing, structured data, and agent access to content.

---

[All pages in Markdown](<https://tropk.ai/sitemap.md>)