Pause payment collection
Learn how to pause payment collection on subscriptions.
You can pause payment collection to temporarily offer a customer your services for free. This is sometimes called a grace period—for example, when a customer needs more time to pay or can’t pay for one or more billing periods.
When you pause payment collection, the subscription remains active and invoices continue to generate, but Stripe doesn’t collect payment. Your customer retains access to the service during this time.
Before you begin
- If you want to pause customer access to the service, pause payment collection, and also pause invoices, see Pause subscriptions instead.
- If you want to permanently stop renewal, see Cancel subscriptions instead.
- Invoices created before you pause subscriptions continue to be retried unless you void them.
Pause payment collection
Use the Dashboard or the API to pause payment collection.
You can choose to pause payment collection indefinitely or automatically resume payment collection at a specific time in the future. During the time that payment collection is paused, Stripe won’t send any upcoming invoice emails or webhooks for these invoices and the subscription’s status remains unchanged.
When you pause payment collection for a subscription, you have three options for how to handle invoices during the paused timeframe:
Keep invoices as drafts ( keep_as_draft) | Invoices are created in draft status with auto_advance set to false. You can finalize and collect payment later. Caution If you have custom logic that finalizes invoices, you might need to disable or modify it so that it doesn’t conflict with these settings. |
|---|---|
Mark invoices uncollectible ( mark_uncollectible) | Invoices are marked as uncollectible. No payment are collected for these periods. Stripe doesn’t send any upcoming invoice emails or webhooks for these invoices. Despite this pause, Stripe applies any existing customer balance to invoices. This behavior helps use available funds before we mark an invoice as uncollectible. If the invoice’s total is paid off entirely using customer balance, then the invoice’s status is set to paid. Otherwise, the invoice’s status is set to uncollectible. |
Void invoices ( void) | Invoices are voided. No record of charges is created for these periods. |
To pause payment collection for a subscription:
- On the Subscriptions page, select the subscription.
- Click the overflow menu () and select Pause payment collection.
- Choose the duration:
- Indefinite : We keep payment collection paused until you resume it.
- Until a custom date : We automatically resume payment collection on the date you choose.
- Choose the Invoice behavior:
- Keep invoices as drafts : Invoices are created as drafts. You can finalize and collect payment later.
- Mark invoices uncollectible : Invoices are marked uncollectible. No payment is collected for these periods.
- Void invoices : Invoices are voided. No record of charges is created for these periods.
- Click Pause.
Note
If you pause a subscription that’s managed by a subscription schedule, scheduled updates still take effect. A subscription schedule phase transition doesn’t automatically remove pause_collection behavior that was set directly on the subscription.
Resume payment collection
You can resume payment collection at any time using the Dashboard or API for a subscription or for invoices kept as drafts.
Resume collection from a subscription
To resume payment collection in the Dashboard:
- On the Subscriptions page, find the applicable subscription.
- Click the overflow menu ( ), and select Resume payment collection .
Collect payment on draft invoices
After you resume payment collection from a subscription, set auto_advance=true on each draft invoice. If you don’t have the invoice IDs, look them up using the subscription ID with status=draft as a filter.
After you resume payment collection from a subscription, for each draft invoice:
- Go to the Invoices page in the Dashboard, and click the invoice to see its details page.
- Click the overflow menu ( ).
- Click Turn on automatic collection . This changes the auto _ advance property on the invoice to true .