HTTP headers / response header

Retry-After

Retry-After: 30

What it does

How long to wait before retrying, in seconds or as an HTTP date. Sent with 429 (rate limit) and 503 (maintenance).

The gotcha

Honor it EXACTLY — retry sooner and well-behaved rate limiters extend your penalty.

Debugging headers on a phone

The fastest way to see what Retry-After is actually doing is to send the request and read both sides raw — ReqPad shows auto-generated and custom headers for every request, on all six protocols, with history. Related references: status codes · WWW-Authenticate · Content-Encoding · Transfer-Encoding · ETag · Last-Modified · Expires

Inspect Retry-After on a live request.

Build the request, send it, read raw headers and timing — from your iPhone. Free to start.