Stripe Dispute Time Limits

When a cardholder files a dispute with their bank, Stripe receives notification and passes it to you. From that moment, you typically have between 7 and 21 days to submit evidence. The exact deadline depends on the card network (Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Discover), the dispute reason code, and in some cases the issuing bank's specific policies.

Stripe shows the exact deadline for each dispute in your Dashboard under the "Due by" field. This is the date by which your evidence must be submitted to Stripe — not the date by which it reaches the card network or issuing bank. Stripe handles the downstream submission, but your window ends when Stripe's deadline expires.

There is one critical rule: you can only submit evidence once. Once you click "Submit" on a dispute response in Stripe, you cannot edit it, add to it, or replace it. There is no second chance. This means you need to have all your evidence gathered and organized before you submit. If you submit incomplete evidence because you're rushing to meet the deadline, you've reduced your chances of winning with no way to recover.

If you submit evidence and the issuing bank rules against you, the dispute process is not necessarily over. Depending on the card network, there may be a pre-arbitration or arbitration phase where you can challenge the decision. However, this stage comes with significant costs and constraints.

Pre-arbitration is the first appeal step. The issuing bank reviews additional evidence or reconsiders the original decision. On Visa, merchants have 30 days to respond to a pre-arbitration notice. On Mastercard, the window is typically 45 days. Not all disputes proceed to pre-arbitration — the card network decides whether the case qualifies.

Arbitration is the final step, and it is expensive. Visa charges a $500 arbitration fee to the losing party. Mastercard charges up to $500 as well. If you lose arbitration, you pay both the disputed amount and the arbitration fee. Because of this cost, arbitration only makes financial sense for disputes above $500-1,000, and only when you have extremely strong evidence that was not adequately considered in the initial review.

Stripe handles pre-arbitration and arbitration on your behalf, but you need to respond promptly when notified. These windows are even shorter than the initial response window, and the consequences of missing them are the same: automatic loss.

While Stripe abstracts away much of the network-level complexity, understanding the differences between Visa and Mastercard timelines helps explain why your response windows vary from dispute to dispute.

Cardholders have 120 days from the transaction date — or from the expected delivery date for physical goods — to file a dispute with their bank. This means a purchase made on January 1st can be disputed as late as May 1st. For products with a future delivery date, the window can extend even further.

This long filing window creates a unique challenge for merchants. You need to retain transaction records, communication logs, delivery confirmations, and access records for at least 120 days after every transaction. For subscription businesses, the window effectively never closes because each billing cycle creates a new 120-day window.

Some dispute types have exceptions to the 120-day rule. Disputes related to recurring transactions can sometimes be filed up to 540 days after the transaction if the cardholder claims they canceled and were still billed. Disputes related to services not yet rendered can be filed up to 120 days after the expected service date, which can extend the window significantly for pre-paid services.

The practical implication: your evidence collection needs to be automatic and persistent. If you are relying on manual record-keeping, you will inevitably lose evidence that could have won a dispute filed 90 days after the transaction. Automated systems that capture and store evidence at the time of transaction ensure you are always prepared, no matter when the dispute arrives.

You might assume that as long as you submit before the deadline, the timing does not matter. Industry data suggests otherwise. Disputes responded to within 24 hours of notification have measurably higher win rates than disputes responded to on day 6 or 7 of a 7-day window.

There are several reasons for this. First, evidence quality degrades over time. Customer memories fade, server logs rotate, and temporary records expire. Evidence gathered immediately after notification is more complete than evidence gathered days later. Second, faster responses signal to the issuing bank that the merchant takes the dispute seriously and has organized records — which creates a favorable impression during review.

Third, some issuing banks process dispute responses in the order received. A response submitted on day 1 may be reviewed sooner, while a response submitted on day 7 might sit in a queue. While this is not officially documented, merchants who consistently respond quickly report higher win rates than those who wait.

Fourth, and most practically: waiting until the deadline creates risk. If your team member is out sick on day 7, if your Stripe account has a temporary access issue, if your evidence file fails to upload — you have no buffer. Responding on day 1 gives you 6 days of margin to catch and fix any problems.

If you are managing disputes manually, you need a system to ensure no deadline slips through. Here are the approaches that work:

Stripe email notifications: Enable dispute notifications in your Stripe Dashboard settings. Every new dispute triggers an email with the amount, reason, and deadline. Set up a filter to flag these emails as high priority in your inbox.

Calendar alerts: When a dispute arrives, immediately create a calendar event 48 hours before the deadline. This gives you a buffer to gather evidence and submit. Set a second alert for 24 hours before as a backup.

Stripe webhooks: For developers, subscribe to charge.dispute.created events via Stripe webhooks. Route these to Slack, PagerDuty, or your internal ticketing system. Treat new disputes with the same urgency as production incidents.

Team ownership: Assign a primary and backup person responsible for dispute responses. If the primary is unavailable, the backup picks up immediately. No dispute should wait for someone to return from vacation.

Or, eliminate the problem entirely. Automated dispute defense systems respond to every dispute immediately — no calendars, no assignments, no risk of human error.