Provisional credits

Learn about provisional credits for EU and UK fraud disputes.

Availability

The provisional credit behavior described in this guide applies only to eligible UK and EU Issuing users in unauthorized or fraud dispute flows.

European and UK payment services regulations require Stripe to reimburse all unauthorized transactions by the end of the next business day after the account holder notifies Stripe of the issue with the transaction.

To comply with UK and EU regulations, we automatically issue a provisional credit for the full disputed amount to UK or EU cardholders by the next business day. We don’t issue this credit if we have reasonable grounds to suspect fraud by the Stripe account user.

For platforms, we apply this credit to your connected account. For Direct users, we apply it to your account. The credit goes to the account holder’s Issuing balance and can be spent immediately, even while the dispute is ongoing.

After resolving the dispute, we clawback the provisional credit from the account that received it. If you win the dispute, we issue a new credit to your account for the amount recovered.

If clawing back the provisional credit results in a negative balance, the balance owner will need to top up their balance. If the balance owner is a connected account, we’ll rely on Connect Reserves.

If we can’t submit the dispute to the card network, we’re still required to determine whether the transaction was unauthorized. We must reimburse the user by the end of the next business day if we determine it was unauthorized.

Find provisional credit information

You can use the Stripe API and other reporting interfaces to query for provisional credits:

To track credits and clawbacks in real-time, integrate with these webhooks, respectively: issuing_dispute.funds_reinstated and issuing_dispute.funds_rescinded. If you’re a Direct user, follow our generic guide on webhooks. If you’re a platform user, see Connect webhooks.

To query historical credits and clawbacks, use the BalanceTransaction API. Find credits with a type of issuing_dispute_provisional_credit and clawbacks with a type of issuing_dispute_provisional_credit_reversal.

For no-code reporting, use the Balance report. You can find credits by filtering for the reporting_category of issuing_dispute_provisional_credit, and clawbacks by filtering for the reporting_category of issuing_dispute_provisional_credit_reversal.