Subscription statuses explained
What Active, Paused, Failed and Cancelled mean on a subscription contract, and why Failing is a view rather than a status.
Every subscription contract carries a status, shown as a pill on the contract and as tabs across the top of Subscriptions → Manage Subscriptions.
There are four statuses. The Failing tab is the one that catches people out, because it is not a status at all.
The four statuses
Active
Billing normally on its schedule. This includes contracts that are mid-dunning after a failed payment.
Paused
Billing is stopped temporarily. An indefinite pause runs until someone reactivates the contract. A timed pause shows Paused until [date] and resumes on its own.
Failed
Billing has stopped after payment could not be collected.
Cancelled
Billing has stopped permanently.
See Pausing, canceling, and reactivating subscriptions for how to tell the two kinds of pause apart on the Paused tab.
Failing contracts are still active, failing is not a status
The Failing tab shows contracts that are still Active but whose most recent billing attempt failed, so they are working through your retry schedule.
That is why a contract can appear under both Active and Failing. Nothing is wrong: the contract is alive, Roadmap is retrying it, and it will return to normal if a retry succeeds.
The same slice is available as a filter, Status: Active plus Last Payment Status: Failed. See Filtering the Subscriptions list.
How a contract reaches Failed
Two routes:
Dunning ran out. The last retry failed and the 1-hour grace period passed. See How to set up payment retries.
You marked it Failed. An admin-only override that moves a contract straight to Failed without waiting for the retries to play out. See Marking a subscription as failed.
A Failed contract needs a working payment method on file before it can be reactivated. Recovering one usually means updating the payment method, confirming it works with Order now, then reactivating.
What each status changes for the customer
On an Active contract the customer's Manage Subscription menu offers the full set of actions. On a Paused or Failed contract it narrows to four: Edit Shipping Address, Update Payment Method, Reactivate Subscription and Cancel Subscription.
Actions that only make sense while billing is running, like Order now, Skip next delivery, Reschedule, Change delivery frequency and Swap Products, are hidden rather than shown and blocked.
Customers cannot reactivate a subscription they have cancelled. See The customer subscription dashboard: a tour.
Status is not the same as Last Payment Status
These are two separate fields and they answer different questions:
Status is the state of the contract: is it billing at all?
Last Payment Status is the result of the most recent attempt: did the last charge go through?
An Active contract with a Failed last payment is mid-dunning. A Failed contract has stopped trying.
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