Issuing balance

Learn how to make funds available to your cards.

To spend money using cards, add funds to the Issuing balance on your account. This balance represents funds reserved for Issuing and is safely separated from your earnings, payouts, and funds from other Stripe products.

Add funds using the Dashboard

Fund your Issuing balance from your Dashboard with the Add to balance button.

Next, choose Fund your Issuing balance.

You can add funds to your Issuing balance using a transfer from your existing Stripe balance or with a top-up from your external bank account. Your top-ups can take up to 5 business days to show up in your Issuing balance.

Top up from the API

To create a new top-up, use the create top-up endpoint.

Command Line

curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/topups \
  -u sk_test_4eC39HqLyjWDarjtT1zdp7dc
: \
  -d destination_balance=issuing \
  -d amount=2000 \
  -d currency=usd \
  -d description="Top-up for Issuing, October 2, 2023" \
  -d statement_descriptor=Top-up

Top-ups debit your bank account. Your top-ups can take up to 5 business days to become available. While they’re pending, they won’t be added to your Issuing balance.

Track your Issuing balance

View your Issuing funds from your balances dashboard.

To programmatically track the funds that are available to spend, look at the issuing object returned by the retrieve balance endpoint. This includes your available and pending Issuing funds.

Command Line

curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/balance \
  -u sk_test_4eC39HqLyjWDarjtT1zdp7dc
:

{
  "object": "balance",
  "available": [
    {
      "amount": 0,
      "currency": "usd",
      "source_types": {
        "card": 0
      }
    }
  ],
  "pending": [
    {
      "amount": 0,
      "currency": "usd",
      "source_types": {
        "card": 0
      }
    }
  ],
  "issuing": {
    "available": [
      {
        "amount": 100,
        "currency": "usd"
      }
    ]
  },
  "livemode": false
}

To track your pending Issuing balance, you can use the list top-ups endpoint and filter on status of pending.

Pay out your Issuing balance

To pay out your available Issuing funds, use the create payout endpoint and set the source_balance of the payout to issuing.

Command Line

curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/payouts \
  -u "sk_test_4eC39HqLyjWDarjtT1zdp7dc
:" \
  -d source_balance=issuing \
  -d amount=100 \
  -d currency=usd

Enable notifications about your balance

You can enable email notifications to help monitor your Issuing balance from your settings. To configure these notifications:

Visit your Balance notifications settings page.
Choose from two types of alerting thresholds:
- Fixed amount: Receive an alert whenever your Issuing balance falls below this amount.
- Ratio of balance to rolling spend: Receive an alert whenever the ratio of your Issuing balance to your spend over the previous 24 hours falls below the threshold. For example, if you set your threshold to 80% and your spend over the past day is 100 USD, you receive an alert whenever your balance falls below 80 USD.

You can configure recipients of these email alerts in your user profile by selecting Issuing balance under Email preferences.