Restricted Card
Category: Restricted/Blocked Card Retryable: no
This code is commonly used as a generic catch-all — issuers deliberately withhold the real reason. Treat the label below as a starting point, not a diagnosis. It will not tell you the actual cause, and neither will anyone who reads it to you.
Variability
Issuer catch-all
Issuers use this code as a deliberate non-answer. Treat the label as a starting point, not a diagnosis.
Retryable
no
Namespace: Legacy/conventional ISO 8583 field-39 code as implemented by card networks and processors — not the current ISO 8583:2023 Annex D table.
What this code typically means
The card is blocked from some or all transactions — a country/geography restriction, a corporate-card merchant-category restriction, or an issuer-side block whose exact trigger is rarely disclosed to the merchant. This is one of the few codes where a processor's own documentation makes the underlying-code relationship explicit in writing: Adyen's refusal reason 25 ('Restricted Card') is described as mapping 'decline codes like 62: Restricted Card' — a direct, citable cross-reference rather than an inferred one.
What to do about it
Merchant action
Treat as a hard decline pending customer action. Do not retry without the customer confirming they've resolved the restriction with their issuer.
Customer-facing guidance
Direct the customer to contact their issuer — the restriction is configured on their account and only the issuer can explain or lift it.
What's happening on the issuer's side
Enforcing an account- or card-level restriction; specifics withheld from the merchant by design in most cases.
Cross-processor equivalents
stripe: restricted_card
commonly treated as equivalent
adyen: 25 — Restricted Card
commonly treated as equivalent — Adyen's documentation explicitly names 62 as one of the codes this bucket maps
Cross-processor mappings are commonly treated as equivalent, not identical — every processor's own documentation notes lossy or partial mapping between raw network codes and its own vocabulary.
Sources
- Stripe — Card decline codes — fetched 2026-08-20
- Adyen — Refusal reason codes — fetched 2026-08-20
- Worldpay ISO 8583 Reference Guide V2.58 — Debit/Credit Response Code Mappings — fetched 2026-08-20
- ISO 8583:2023 Annex D — Action codes (current standard, 4-digit) — fetched 2026-08-20
Concept + retry philosophy
Decline Codes: why they're opaque and how to retry them