How Long Should a Refund Take by Law? Card, Airline, and Mail Rules

How long a refund should take by law depends on how you paid and what you bought. A credit card return should post within about ten business days, an airline owes you a refund within seven business days on a credit card purchase or 20 calendar days on cash or debit, an undelivered mail, phone, or online order must be refunded within seven working days of cancellation, and a canceled door-to-door sale must be refunded within ten business days. Debit card returns, oddly, have no federal deadline at all once the merchant agrees to refund you.

Refund Deadlines at a Glance

Credit card return: 7 business days for the merchant to notify the issuer, plus 3 business days for the issuer to post the credit.
Airline cancellation or significant schedule change: 7 business days (credit card) or 20 calendar days (cash, check, debit).
Undelivered remote order after cancellation: 7 working days.
Door-to-door or off-site sale canceled during cooling-off period: 10 business days after the seller receives your notice.
Debit card refund from a merchant: no federally mandated timeline.
Debit card error or unauthorized charge investigation by your bank: 10 business days, extendable to 45 with a provisional credit.

Online, Phone, and Mail Orders That Never Arrive

The FTC’s Mail, Internet, or Telephone Order Merchandise Rule covers anything you buy remotely. If the seller advertised a shipping date, it has to meet it. If no date was mentioned, it must ship within 30 days of receiving your completed order. If you opened store credit at the time of the purchase, that window stretches to 50 days.¹

When the seller can’t ship on time, it has to notify you and offer a choice: agree to wait longer or cancel for a full refund. A proposed delay of 30 days or less becomes consent by silence. A delay longer than 30 days, or one with no estimated ship date, automatically cancels the order unless you specifically agree to keep waiting. You can also cancel any time before the item actually ships.¹

Once a cancellation triggers a refund, the seller has seven working days to send it, regardless of how you paid. If the seller itself extended you credit for the purchase (not a third-party card), it gets one billing cycle instead. The rule does not cover subscriptions after the first shipment, seed and plant orders, or collect-on-delivery transactions.²

Credit Card Returns

Regulation Z creates a two-step clock for credit card refunds. The merchant has seven business days from accepting your return to send a credit notice to the card issuer. The issuer then has three business days after receiving that notice to post the credit.³ The credit should appear on your statement within roughly ten business days of the return. If it doesn’t, one of the two parties missed its deadline.

A related rule: if a merchant gives cash refunds to cash-paying customers, it must also offer a refund or credit to customers who paid by card, unless it disclosed at the time of purchase that credit card sales are not refundable.³

Airline Refunds After a Cancellation or Big Schedule Change

The Department of Transportation’s automatic refund rule at 14 CFR Part 260 sets firm deadlines when an airline cancels your flight or makes a significant schedule change. Credit card purchases must be refunded within seven business days. Cash, check, or debit card purchases must be refunded within 20 calendar days.⁴

A significant change has specific thresholds. For domestic flights, the departure moves three or more hours earlier, or the arrival lands three or more hours later than scheduled. For international flights, the threshold is six hours in either direction. You do not have to accept a rebooking or voucher. The refund is yours if you ask for it.⁵

Debit Card Refunds Work Differently

This one catches people off guard. The Electronic Fund Transfer Act and Regulation E, at 12 CFR Part 1005, do not require a merchant to issue a debit refund within any specific number of days.⁶ Once a merchant does agree to refund you, the money typically takes two to three business days to post, but that timing reflects banking network processing rather than a legal mandate.

Where Regulation E does set a hard deadline is error resolution. If you report an unauthorized charge or an error to your bank, it has to investigate and reach a decision within 10 business days. It can extend the investigation to 45 days, but only if it provisionally credits your account within those initial 10 business days so you have access to the money while it looks into the problem.⁷

Door-to-Door and Off-Site Sales

If a salesperson comes to your home or pitches you at a hotel, convention center, or fairground, a separate FTC rule gives you three business days to cancel for a full refund. It applies to sales of $25 or more at your home and $130 or more at other temporary locations. Purchases made entirely online, by mail, or over the phone are not covered.⁸

Once you cancel, the seller has 10 business days after receiving your notice to refund every payment and return any trade-in property. The seller also has to give you a written cancellation notice at the time of sale, in the language used during the pitch, and tell you orally about the right to cancel. If it never provided the notice, the three-day clock may not have started at all.⁸

The 60-Day Deadline That Protects Your Right to Dispute

If a merchant refuses to refund you or a charge is wrong on your credit card statement, your written billing error notice must reach the card issuer within 60 days of the date it sent the first statement showing the charge.⁹ After that, the issuer has no obligation to investigate. This is where most people lose their leverage. Open your statements, digital ones included, and do not sit on a problem for two months.

While the dispute is open, you don’t have to pay the disputed amount or the finance charges tied to it. If the issuer finds in your favor, it has to reverse the charge along with any interest or fees that accumulated on it.⁹

What to Do When a Refund Runs Late

Your first move depends on how you paid. For a credit card purchase, file a billing error dispute with your card issuer inside the 60-day window.⁹ For a debit card error or unauthorized charge, contact your bank and invoke Regulation E’s error resolution process, which forces the bank to investigate within 10 business days.⁷

If the merchant and your financial institution both fail you, escalate to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The CFPB’s complaint portal forwards your case to the company, which generally responds within 15 calendar days, or up to 60 calendar days in more complex cases.¹⁰ For a merchant’s sales practices rather than a financial institution’s handling of your account, the FTC or your state attorney general’s consumer protection division is the better route. Keep every receipt, confirmation email, and written exchange. Documentation is what separates complaints that get resolved from ones that go nowhere.

1
eCFR. 16 CFR Part 435 – Mail, Internet, or Telephone Order Merchandise
2
eCFR. 16 CFR 435.1 – Definitions
3
eCFR. 12 CFR 1026.12 – Special Credit Card Provisions
4
eCFR. 14 CFR Part 260 – Refunds for Airline Fare and Ancillary Service Fees
5
U.S. Department of Transportation. What Airline Passengers Need to Know About DOT’s Automatic Refund Rule
6
eCFR. 12 CFR Part 1005 – Electronic Fund Transfers (Regulation E)
7
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. 12 CFR 1005.11 – Procedures for Resolving Errors
8
eCFR. 16 CFR Part 429 – Rule Concerning Cooling-off Period for Sales Made at Homes or at Certain Other Locations
9
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. 12 CFR 1026.13 – Billing Error Resolution
10
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Your Company’s Role in the Complaint Process