Google Play subscription grace period and account hold

You adjust or disable the grace period and account hold per base plan in Play Console. Account hold is calculated automatically as 60 days minus the grace period, and grace period plus account hold must total 30 days or more. Google warns that shorter periods than the defaults may reduce the number of subscriptions recovered. A change only affects renewals that enter grace period afterwards: if you move from 7 to 14 days, users already in a grace period keep their old length. You can set the grace period to 0 days, but Play still waits at least 1 day for payment retries; during that 24-hour silent grace period the subscription stays ACTIVE. For a subscription with add-ons, the active item with the shortest grace period sets the recovery period.

During the grace period the user should keep their benefits. queryPurchasesAsync() still returns the purchase, so an app that checks entitlement only through the Play Billing Library handles it automatically. On the backend, listen for real-time developer notifications: the subscription resource shows autoRenewEnabled = true and Google keeps extending expiryTime until the grace period ends. Call purchases.subscriptionsv2.get() when a notification arrives rather than waiting for the expiry time. If the user fixes the payment, the subscription renews on its original renewal date. Once in account hold, remove access, but keep handling cancellations, restorations and repurchases.

Play tells users in a grace period that their payment was declined and asks them to fix it in the Play Store. Google also recommends the In-App Messaging API, available to all developers, which shows a payment decline message inside your app, and can also notify users of upcoming price changes. Other store deadlines that affect subscription apps: the Play Billing Library version requirement and target API level.

On September 29, 2026 Google described Dynamic Grace Period among the subscription features it is testing and rolling out. Instead of one fixed length, Google Play uses machine learning and heuristic models to set the grace period for each subscriber after a payment decline, based on how likely they are to recover. It then adjusts the account hold so your total configured recovery window stays the same, with no client-side code changes.

Recovering failed payments protects the subscribers you have; being found brings new ones. Censuus ranks apps by the visits they draw, and adding your app is free on the List my app form. Placement comes from traffic and sponsorship: apps climb on the visits they draw, and a sponsor can pay to rise higher.