Authorization rate

Authorization rate is the share of attempted payment transactions that the card issuer or bank approves at the moment of the request, before any later step such as capture or settlement. It is calculated as approved authorizations / total authorization attempts, and is typically measured by the merchant, the payment processor, and the issuer, each of whom sees slightly different numbers depending on where in the flow a decline occurs.

Declines happen for many reasons: insufficient funds, an issuer's fraud rules, an expired card, or a technical mismatch between how the merchant and issuer formatted the request. This last category, "soft" or false declines, is a major focus of payments analytics, since these transactions are legitimate but fail for fixable reasons such as poor data quality or outdated retry logic, unlike a "hard" decline that reflects a genuine problem with the card or account. Authorization rate is a narrower, earlier-stage metric than payment success rate, which typically also captures failures after authorization, such as a customer abandoning a 3-D Secure step.