• Why your Lightning payment failed (and what to try)
  • 1. No route found / insufficient liquidity
  • 2. The invoice expired
  • 3. The recipient’s wallet is offline
  • 4. The recipient can’t receive that much
  • 5. Fee limit too low
  • 6. Lightning address or LNURL server problem
  • 7. “Pending” forever
  • 8. Already paid, wrong network, wrong thing
  • Quick checklist

§Why your Lightning payment failed (and what to try)

“Payment failed” is the most annoying message in Bitcoin. It almost never means your money is gone. Here are the usual causes, roughly from most to least common, and what to do about each.

§1. No route found / insufficient liquidity

Lightning payments hop through channels, and each channel only has so much room in each direction. If no path has enough room for your amount, the payment fails.

• Try a smaller amount. If 50,000 sats fails but 10,000 works, it’s liquidity.
• Split it into a few payments if the recipient agrees.
• Retry in a few minutes. Wallets learn from failures and try other paths.
• Self-custodial wallet? You may not have enough outbound room in your own channel, even if your balance looks big. Check the wallet’s “can send” figure, not just the total.

§2. The invoice expired

Invoices have a timer (often 10-60 minutes, sometimes less). An old QR code or a link you opened yesterday won’t work. Ask for a fresh invoice, or use their Lightning address so your wallet fetches a new one.

§3. The recipient’s wallet is offline

Self-custodial mobile wallets usually need the app to be reachable to receive. If they’re asleep with the phone off, your payment can’t land. Custodial wallets and Lightning addresses run by a server don’t have this problem. Ask them to open the app, then retry.

§4. The recipient can’t receive that much

The receiving side needs inbound room too. A brand-new self-custodial wallet may need to open (or grow) a channel first, which can cost a fee or take a little while. Smaller first payments are easier.

§5. Fee limit too low

Your wallet caps routing fees. For small payments the cap is sometimes too tight to find any route. Some wallets let you raise the max fee in settings. Routing fees are usually a few sats, so a slightly higher limit is rarely expensive.

§6. Lightning address or LNURL server problem

When you pay name@domain, your wallet first asks that domain’s server for an invoice. If the server is down, misconfigured, or rejects your amount (min/max limits), you get an error before any payment is tried. Nothing left your wallet. Try later, or ask for a plain invoice.

§7. “Pending” forever

Sometimes a payment gets stuck in flight. Don’t panic and don’t pay again right away. A stuck payment either completes or fails and returns to you, usually within minutes. In rare cases it can take hours or longer (until a timeout passes). Check with the recipient before you pay twice.

§8. Already paid, wrong network, wrong thing

• Invoices can be paid only once. “Already paid” means it went through.
• A testnet or signet invoice (starts with lntb / lntbs) can’t be paid from a mainnet wallet.
• A Bitcoin on-chain address isn’t a Lightning invoice. Lightning invoices start with lnbc (or are a Lightning address / LNURL).

§Quick checklist

1. Fresh invoice? 2. Smaller amount? 3. Recipient’s app open? 4. Retry in 5 minutes. 5. Still stuck: raise max fee, or pay on-chain instead.

Questions? Reply and I’ll add them here.