202 Accepted means the server has accepted the request but has not completed it, and might not complete it at all. HTTP has no way to report the result of background work later, so 202 is deliberately non-committal.
It is used for batch jobs, exports, video transcoding, message queues and other work that runs in the background. A good 202 response tells the client how to follow up: a URL where the status can be checked (in the body or a Location header) and an estimate of when the job will be done, sometimes with Retry-After.
Clients treat 202 as a success. Webhook senders, for example, accept it like any 2xx code as confirmation that an event was received.
Example response
HTTP/1.1 202 Accepted
Date: Fri, 06 Nov 2026 10:15:32 GMT
Location: https://api.example.com/v1/exports/3f9c
Retry-After: 30
Content-Type: application/json
Content-Length: 31
{"id":"3f9c","status":"queued"}SEO and redirect checking
202 has no place on pages meant for search engines. Crawlers treat it as a success, but there is usually nothing to index. Analytics beacons and tracking endpoints often return 202 or 204, which is fine because they are not crawled as pages.
Common causes and use cases
- An API queued a long-running job and returns a URL where its status can be polled.
- A webhook receiver acknowledges an event immediately and processes it later.
- A logging or analytics endpoint accepts data without confirming that it was stored.