How to recover expired_card failed payments in Stripe

Why it happens

• The bank reissued the card and the customer never updated subscriptions.
• Card networks' automatic updates (which Stripe uses where available) did not cover this card or issuer.
• The customer forgot which services were attached to the old card.

What Stripe does on its own

Stripe's card-account-updater catches many reissued cards automatically, but when a charge still fails with expired_card, the updater did not have new details. Retries against an expired card are pointless. Action has to come from the customer.

Bank decline codes you may see alongside expired_card

Your customer's bank sends its own numeric code, which Stripe surfaces separately from its decline_code. The same number means different things on different card networks, and Stripe does not publish a strict one-to-one mapping between them, so treat these as codes commonly seen with this failure rather than as equivalents.

Quoted from Stripe's network decline codes reference.

The recovery playbook

1. Email immediately. There is no retry worth waiting for. Include the Stripe-hosted invoice link, which lets the customer pay and update the card in one step.
2. Be specific in the subject line ("your card ending 4242 has expired"). Vague billing emails get ignored; specific ones read as legitimate.
3. Follow up once after 3-4 days if unpaid; expired-card cases decay quickly once the customer's attention moves on.
4. Turn on expiring-card alerts (pre-dunning): MRRdue can warn you up to 30 days before a card expires with an optional read-only Payment Methods scope. The email goes out before the failure ever happens.

Very recoverable in the first week. These are engaged customers with a stale card, not churn risks. Speed matters more than copywriting here.

The email to send

This is the exact template MRRdue's recovery assistant suggests for expired_card cases. Copy it, swap the details, and send it from your own address.

Hi Alex,

I noticed your recent $49.00 payment didn't go through (the card on file has expired). No worries at all — these things happen, and it's usually a quick fix.

Here's a secure link to update your payment details — it only takes a minute:
https://invoice.stripe.com/i/…

Once that's done we'll take care of the rest automatically. If anything's unclear, just reply to this email — a real person reads every one.

Thanks so much,
Your SaaS

More variants (and retention-risk templates) in the free recovery email template gallery.