There are a few things you should pay attention to if you are trying to pay with your bunq card and the payment is not accepted. Below you’ll find a list of what you should check if your card payment fails.

If you made a card payment for which you had to enter your PIN code :

Wrong PIN 🔑
If the payment is declined because a wrong PIN has been entered, the screen of the terminal and your bunq app will tell you so. In this situation, you should change your card’s PIN which will instantly be updated in our system. However, if you try to pay again right after, a few terminals might not be able to read the updated PIN code on the chip of your card and give you the same error message. In this situation, you should make an ATM transaction to ensure that the PIN code of your card gets updated on the chip of your card as well.

Note: If you entered the wrong PIN code 3 times, you will need to reset it in the bunq app to complete the payment.

Country is not allowed 🌍
When you are travelling, it might happen that your card payments get declined because the country you are visiting is not enabled yet. You can easily change that by adding it to your list of enabled countries or by enabling card payments worldwide. You can see how to do this here.

Card is not active 💳
In order to be approved, card payments must be done with an active card. This means that if you have just ordered your card and did not activate it yet or if your card is temporarily frozen, the payment will not go through. In such cases, you should first activate your card before you try to pay again.

Exceeded daily limit 📊
To protect your money, we have set a default daily limit of €1,000 per day that can be adjusted up to €50,000 per day. You can always change it by following the steps presented on this link.

Cash withdrawals 🏧
If you can’t withdraw money at an ATM, you should first make sure that you haven’t reached your daily limit of €500 set for all bunq cards and keep in mind that the ATM might have its own limit too. In this case, withdrawing a lower sum can help you withdraw correctly.

Insufficient balance 💵
When you are trying to pay an amount bigger than the balance on your account, the payment will not go through to make sure you don’t fall into debt. In this situation, you should top up your account or link your card to another bunq sub-account to complete the payment.

If you made a contactless payment:

Exceeded daily limit 📊
To protect your cards, we have set daily limits for contactless payments of €25 per transaction and €50 for all transactions (when this amount is reached, you just need to provide a PIN and the daily counter will reset. When a country is enabled in your card settings, the local contactless limit will apply)

You can find more information about daily limits on this link

We need a PIN for this payment🙋
If your contactless payment gets declined and you get the error message”PIN not received”, this means we will need your PIN code for this transaction. In this case, you should try to pay inserting your card in the terminal.

Card is not active 💳
In order to be approved, card payments must be done with an active card. This means that if you have just ordered you card and did not activate it yet or if you card is temporarily frozen, the payment will not go through. In these cases, you should first activate your card before you try to pay again.

If you made an online payment:

Wrong Card details 💳
If you are trying to pay online with your bunq card and the payment is declined, the first thing to do would be checking again your card details and make sure you entered the correct card number, expiry date and you current CVC code, especially if you have the rotating CVC feature on.

You can find your card details here or in the app under Cards > Select the right card > Card details

Merchant is blocked 🚫
If a payment to the same merchant failed more than 3 times within an hour, we will block all transactions to this merchant for 60 minutes for security reasons. The failures can happen when you filled the card details incorrectly or if the merchant for some reason couldn’t process the information properly.
In this situation, you should wait an hour before you try to make another payment to this merchant. Make sure to also turn off the rotating CVC feature in your card settings, to ensure that the merchant is able to use the correct CVC.

Insufficient balance 💵
When you are trying to pay an amount bigger than the one on your account, the payment will not go through to make sure you don’t fall into debt. In this situation, you should top up your account or link your card to another bunq account to complete the payment.

Card is not active 💳
In order to be approved, card payments must be done with an active card. This means that if you have just ordered you card and did not activate it yet or if you card is temporarily frozen, the payment will not go through. In these cases, you should first activate your card before you try to pay again.

If the payment failed and there is no event in your bunq app:

If you tried to pay with your bunq card, the payment was not accepted and nothing appeared under “Events” in your bunq app, this may be due to one of the following reasons:

You are using a card that is not accepted by the terminal. You should therefore try to use your MasterCard if you tried to pay with the Maestro (and vice-versa).
You are paying at an offline terminal with a Maestro card. In this case, you should use your Mastercard to solve it.
Your card is being blocked by the acquirer. In this situation, you can contact the merchant to help them ensure that your card is accepted correctly.
Your card is faulty and your payments get declined everywhere. The only thing to do in this situation is to replace your card in the bunq app. You can always use Apple Pay or Google Pay, until your new card gets delivered for your purchases.

Want to learn more?

Explore more bunq knowledge here. 🌈