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Retry-After

The Retry-After response HTTP header indicates how long the user agent should wait before making a follow-up request. There are three main cases this header is used:

  • When sent with a 503 (Service Unavailable) response, this indicates how long the service is expected to be unavailable.
  • When sent with a 429 (Too Many Requests) response, this indicates how long to wait before making a new request.
  • When sent with a redirect response, such as 301 (Moved Permanently), this indicates the minimum time that the user agent is asked to wait before issuing the redirected request.

Syntax

Retry-After: <http-date>
Retry-After: <delay-seconds>

Directives

<http-date>
A date after which to retry. See the Date header for more details on the HTTP date format.
<delay-seconds>
A non-negative decimal integer indicating the seconds to delay after the response is received.

Examples

Dealing with scheduled downtime

Support for the Retry-After header on both clients and servers is still inconsistent. However, some crawlers and spiders, like the Googlebot, honor the Retry-After header. It is useful to send it along with a 503 (Service Unavailable) response, so that search engines will keep indexing your site when the downtime is over.

Retry-After: Wed, 21 Oct 2015 07:28:00 GMT
Retry-After: 120

Specifications

Specification Title
RFC 7231, section 7.1.3: Retry-After Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Semantics and Content

Browser compatibility

Feature Chrome Edge Firefox Internet Explorer Opera Safari
Basic support ? Yes No1 ? ? ?
Feature Android webview Chrome for Android Edge mobile Firefox for Android IE mobile Opera Android iOS Safari
Basic support ? ? Yes ? ? ? ?

1. See Bug 230260.

See also

© 2005–2018 Mozilla Developer Network and individual contributors.
Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License v2.5 or later.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Retry-After