Retry-After indicator
The Retry-After indicator is an HTTP response header or field specifying when a client may retry a request or how long it should wait.
The Design of Web APIs, Second Edition
The Retry-After header is an HTTP response header that indicates when a client may retry a request or how long it should wait.
- How it is used
- Guides consumers through rate limits, planned interruptions, and selected long-running operations.
- How deep it goes
- Explains response choices, date and duration formats, and polling use, but stops short of defining rate-limit policies.
- Examples
- Uses money-transfer rate limits, banking holidays, maintenance windows, and simulation-status polling.
- What you can do after
- Apply it via HTTP responses that give consumers an actionable retry time during temporary failure or throttling.
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API Design Patterns
The Retry-After header is an HTTP response header that indicates how long a client should wait before making a subsequent request or the time at which it may retry.
- How it is used
- Guides clients toward a server-specified retry time after transient or time-related failures.
- How deep it goes
- Explains header semantics, date-versus-duration formatting, clock risks, and client handling, but not broader retry safety rules in detail.
- Examples
- Uses a 120-second duration, a timestamp example, and a TypeScript chat-room retry loop.
- What you can do after
- Operate/configure a retrying client that honors server delays and otherwise applies bounded, jittered exponential back-off.
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Related concepts
- HTTP headerkind of · An HTTP header is a named metadata field in an HTTP request or response that conveys information about the message or directs its processing.
- retryconfigures · A retry is a subsequent attempt to perform an operation after an earlier attempt fails or does not complete successfully.
- exponential backoffalternative to · Exponential backoff is a retry strategy that progressively increases the delay between successive attempts after failures, typically by a multiplicative factor.
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