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Must know
  • A declined renewal is retried over a short grace window before anything changes — the member keeps access during retries.
  • After retries are exhausted the membership is marked Lapsed and access is suspended.
  • A lapsed membership is recoverable: a later successful charge flips it straight back to Active.
When a recurring membership charge is declined, the membership isn’t renewed on credit and it isn’t cut off on the first miss. Instead it goes through a dunning flow:
1

The charge is retried

Uplifter re-attempts the payment a few times over a short grace window. Through this window the member keeps their access, and the guardian is prompted to fix the payment method.
2

It lapses if retries run out

If none of the attempts succeed, the membership is marked Lapsed and access is suspended.
3

It recovers on a successful charge

A lapsed membership isn’t a dead end. As soon as a charge succeeds again — after the guardian updates their card — the membership flips back to Active and coverage is restored.
One case worth knowing: a member with no saved payment method now follows this same retry-then-lapse path, rather than being skipped indefinitely. That means a membership with no card on file will eventually lapse instead of quietly staying active forever. The exact number of retries, the spacing between them, and how suspension is handled are shared across all recurring charges (memberships, recurring programs, and more) — see the recurring-charge article for those mechanics. This article covers only the membership-specific behavior: the no-card case and the lapse-and-recover cycle. You can spot members heading this way from the overdue and lapsing rollups. Related: What happens when a recurring charge fails? · How do I find overdue or lapsing members? · What families see when a payment fails