Glossary
HTTP 402 Payment Required
In short
An HTTP status code reserved since the 1990s and now used by pay-per-crawl and x402 to tell a client that access needs payment. RFC 2068 (January 1997) defined the code and RFC 9110 still lists it as reserved for future use. 28 of 10,565 home pages in the crawl answered 402 to its user agent.
Definition
An HTTP status code reserved since the 1990s and now used by pay-per-crawl and x402 to tell a client that access needs payment.
Sourced example
AWS WAF returns a machine-readable 402 under x402 with prices, accepted payment methods and license terms. Source, read 2026-11-04.
How it shows up here
RFC 2068 (January 1997) defined the code and RFC 9110 still lists it as reserved for future use. 28 of 10,565 home pages in the crawl answered 402 to its user agent.
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Sources
Last reviewed 2026-11-04