Adjust an estimated authorization
Last updated: April 8, 2026
If you've performed an estimated authorization, you can request an incremental authorization to increase one of the following:
- The original authorization amount for Visa and Mastercard globally, and American Express in the United States.
- The authorization's validity period for Mastercard and Mada.
For example, a car rental agency may need to increase the authorization amount when a vehicle is returned due to additional fees.
Information
Mastercard and Mada refer to estimated authorizations as 'preauthorizations'.
An incremental authorization increases the original authorization amount by the amount you specify in the request. The final authorization amount will be the sum of the estimated authorization and all subsequent incremental authorizations.
Note
You cannot increase the original authorization amount for Mada cards.
You can perform any number of incremental authorizations within the estimated authorization's validity period. However, you cannot perform any further incremental authorizations once you have fully or partially captured the payment.
Call the Increment authorization endpoint, setting the payment ID returned in the original authorization's response, as the {id} path parameter.
Information
Your base URL's {prefix} value is unique to your account and environment. To learn how to retrieve your base URLs for the sandbox and production environments, see API endpoints.
post
https://{prefix}.api.checkout.com/payments/{id}/authorizations
You can perform an incremental authorization to increase the amount of time you have to capture the payment before it expires.
For Mastercard and Mada payments, you have 30 and 14 days respectively from the date of the original estimated authorization to capture the payment.
For Mastercard, each incremental authorization you perform resets the 30-day expiry period. For Mada cards, you can only extend the validity period once.
Note
For Visa estimated authorizations, the expiry period cannot be extended.
To increase the authorization's validity period, send a request with the amount field set to 0.
Call the following endpoint with the payment id returned in the original authorization's response:
Information
Your base URL's {prefix} value is unique to your account and environment. To learn how to retrieve your base URLs for the sandbox and production environments, see API endpoints.
post
https://{prefix}.api.checkout.com/payments/{id}/authorizations