Decline code 78: No Account
By Jay Stevens · Principal EngineerReviewed by Jordan MederichUpdated 3 min readQuick answer
Decline code 78 — “No Account” — comes from the cardholder’s issuing bank: the account the card resolves to does not exist (or was never opened). Under the ISO 8583 standard it’s a hard decline, so a blind retry never clears it. Stripe surfaces the same issuer decision as the account_closed / new_account_information_available decline_code, and NMI returns it as response code 222 (“No account”). Recovering it requires a new, valid card from the customer — not re-attempts.
What code 78 means
A 78 means the account the card points to doesn’t exist or was never opened — there is nothing to retry against. Don’t re-run the charge; recover it by getting a different, valid card from the customer through direct outreach.
Cross-processor equivalents
The same issuer decision surfaces under a different code on every processor. Here is how code 78 maps across the stacks Revatto recovers on.
Why it happens
- The card maps to an account the issuer has no record of — closed, never opened, or never funded.
- A reissued or transferred card whose old account was retired and the new account hasn’t propagated to the network.
- A mistyped or stale card number on file that resolves to a valid BIN but an invalid account.
- A bank merger, account migration, or product change that retired the underlying account number.
- A virtual or single-use card number whose backing account has already been deactivated.
How to recover it
- 1Don’t re-run the same card — a 78 means there is no account to charge, so repeat attempts only inflate your decline ratio.
- 2Reach the customer on a channel they actually answer — email and SMS — explain the card on file is no longer valid, and ask for an updated payment method.
- 3Confirm the new card clears with a fresh authorization before resuming the subscription, so you don’t restart the dunning loop on another dead account.
- 4When the customer goes quiet, a real person — not another automated email — works the card update directly. That AI-plus-human handoff is exactly what Revatto does for you: we recover the payment end to end, and you only pay if it works (20% of the first recovered payment, $0 setup, $0 monthly, cancel anytime).See how Revatto recovers 78declines →
See what Revatto would recover for you
Failed payments recovered automatically — no engineering, no manual chasing. We do the work; you keep the revenue.