Name

Retry-After

Synopsis

Servers can use the Retry-After header to tell a client when to retry its request for a resource. It is used with the 503 Service Unavailable status code to give the client a specific date and time (or number of seconds) at which it should retry its request.

A server can also use this header when it is redirecting clients to resources, giving the client a time to wait before making a request on the resource to which it is redirected.[9] This can be very useful to servers that are creating dynamic resources, allowing the server to redirect the client to the newly created resource but giving time for the resource to be created.

Type

Response header

Basic Syntax

Retry-After: (HTTP-date | delta-seconds)

Examples

Retry-After: Tue, 3 Oct 1997 02:15:31 GMT

Retry-After: 120

[9] See Table 3-8 for more on server redirect responses.

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