Authorization rate

The percentage of attempted payments that receive an approval from the issuer.

When this matters

You are quantifying the revenue impact of payments work.
You are comparing PSPs, acquirers, or routing strategies.
You are prioritising experiments across cost, auth, and fraud.

Operator tips

Define a consistent denominator (e.g., exclude obvious customer errors) so trends are comparable.
Slice auth rate by geography, method, and new vs returning customers.
Pair auth-rate metrics with decline taxonomy so you can act on the signal.

How to use this term

Use this definition when you are aligning stakeholders across product, engineering, finance, and operations. Shared vocabulary makes it much easier to argue about tradeoffs without talking past each other.

For deeper context, pair this term with the free assessment and providers/methods directories. They give you a concrete view of how concepts show up in real stacks.