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Start by determining whether Core Lightning considers the payment pending, complete, or failed. Run listpays for the invoice or payment hash, then inspect individual attempts with listsendpays and obtain the definitive failure object with waitsendpay. That sequence separates a payment that is still unresolved from one that failed, and tells you whether to investigate the invoice, fee and delay limits, or routing.

1. Establish the payment’s actual state

Do not begin by changing channels or increasing fees. First ask CLN for the payment-level result. A payment can have several parts and attempts, so the aggregate status is the correct starting point.

listpays bolt11-invoice
listpays payment-hash

Use the form supported by your installed release: an invoice string identifies the payment when you have the original invoice, while a payment hash is useful when an application or log recorded only the hash. The response combines the known parts and reports one of three states:

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  • pending: CLN has not established a final success or failure for the payment.
  • complete: the payment succeeded.
  • failed: the payment has reached a definitive failure state.

A command-line timeout, a wallet interface that stopped waiting, or a temporarily missing response is not proof of failure. Check listpays again before starting a replacement payment. Sending a second payment while the first is still pending can create two payments for the same invoice.

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2. Inspect the individual parts and attempts

If the aggregate result is not enough, drop to the send level. CLN can try several routes concurrently, and a multi-part payment can contain several parts. There may therefore be more than one sendpay record for one payment hash.

listsendpays bolt11-invoice
listsendpays payment-hash

Filter or select the records that match the invoice or hash you are diagnosing. Look at each attempt’s status, part identifier, amount, route, and failure information instead of assuming the first record is the whole payment. This distinction matters when one part failed but another part is still being retried, or when an earlier route failed and a later route succeeded.

  • Use listpays to answer “What is the payment’s overall state?”
  • Use listsendpays to answer “Which attempts and parts produced that state?”

Keep the payment hash, part identifier, and attempt details together when collecting logs. They let you correlate an application error with the exact CLN attempt rather than with an unrelated payment made to the same destination.

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3. Get a definitive result from waitsendpay

For a payment initiated with sendpay, use waitsendpay to wait for completion or failure. It can poll until CLN has a final answer and, for a route failure, return considerably more information than a generic “payment failed” message.

waitsendpay payment-hash

A route-failure object can identify:

  • the index of the hop that reported the error;
  • the node at that hop;
  • the channel involved; and
  • the BOLT #4 failure code.

Use those fields to determine where the attempted route stopped. A failure reported by an intermediate hop points to a different investigation than a local limit rejection or an expired invoice. Preserve the complete object in your logs; reducing it to the numeric code loses the node and channel context that can make the next action obvious.

A timeout is not a failed payment

If waitsendpay times out, it means CLN did not obtain a definitive success or failure within the waiting period. It does not establish that the recipient was not paid. Query listpays and, when necessary, call waitsendpay again with an appropriate waiting period. Only treat the payment as failed once CLN reports a failed state or a definitive failure result.

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4. Verify the invoice before changing routing

Invoice problems are independent of route availability. Check the invoice or payment hash with listinvoices when that information is available to your node:

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listinvoices bolt11-invoice
listinvoices payment-hash

Confirm that you are investigating the same invoice encoded in the payment attempt. A copied invoice can be for a different amount, destination, or payment hash, and an invoice that has expired cannot be made payable by finding a better route.

Error 207: invoice expiry

The pay reference documents error 207 for an expired invoice. Obtain a new invoice from the recipient and pay that new invoice; do not repeatedly retry an invoice that is already past its expiry.

Error 205: no route found

Error 205 means CLN could not find a route under the conditions of that attempt. It is a routing result, not evidence that the invoice is invalid. Inspect the attempts and the route-failure object before deciding whether the problem is reachability, channel liquidity, or a local policy limit.

Error 206: fee or delay exceeds configured limits

Error 206 indicates that the required fee or timelock delay would exceed the limits configured for the payment. The payment may be routable in the network, but not within the constraints you supplied or CLN is using. Review the fee and delay settings and compare them with the route that produced the error before attempting another payment.

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5. Separate routing failures from local constraints

A payment can fail because no usable route was found, because a hop rejected the route, or because the route would violate your fee or delay limits. These cases require different remedies.

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What you observe Most useful next check Likely direction
listpays is pending Wait or poll with waitsendpay; inspect active parts with listsendpays. Do not restart the payment until its state is known.
A definitive route failure includes a hop, node, channel, and BOLT #4 code Identify the failing hop and interpret the code in the context of that attempt. Investigate the reported channel or forwarding policy before changing local settings.
No route is found and no invoice error is reported Review available channels and try the route-selection facilities supported by your release. Reachability, channel liquidity, or route diversity is the primary suspect.
The error says the fee or delay limit is exceeded Compare the attempted route’s requirements with your configured limits. Adjust limits only if the additional cost or timelock exposure is acceptable.
The invoice is expired Request a fresh invoice. Routing changes cannot repair an expired invoice.

Do not infer a network-wide outage from one failed route. A single channel can reject an attempt while another route remains usable. Conversely, repeated failures to different destinations can indicate a broader problem with your channel graph, liquidity, or configuration. The individual attempt data tells you which situation you have.

6. What to do when the failure is route-related

Try the route-iteration command supported by your release

The Core Lightning FAQ points to xpay as a way to iterate through possible routes. This is useful when the first candidate route fails and another route may work, but it is not a guarantee that every payment will succeed. Run it only with parameters documented for your installed CLN version and preserve the resulting attempt details for diagnosis.

Assess channel availability before opening anything

The official FAQ describes opening more channels as the best and most common solution to a route-failure problem because additional channels can increase the routes available to the recipient and lower the probability of failure. Treat that as an operational routing option, not a universal fix. A new channel does not repair an expired invoice, a misconfigured fee or delay limit, or a specific forwarding policy rejection.

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Before committing capital to another channel, use the failed attempt’s hop and channel information to ask:

  • Is the destination reachable through only one or two of your channels?
  • Do your existing channels provide a plausible path and sufficient usable balance for this amount?
  • Are repeated failures concentrated on the same peer or channel?
  • Would a different channel materially increase route diversity, or merely duplicate an existing path?

These checks turn “open more channels” into a targeted capacity decision rather than a reflexive response to every failed payment.

Do not confuse a failed attempt with a failed payment

In a multi-part payment, one part may fail while CLN retries or completes the remaining parts. Review all records in listsendpays and the aggregate state in listpays before concluding that the entire payment failed.

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7. Review fee and timelock limits deliberately

Fee and delay limits protect your node from routes that are too expensive or keep funds locked for too long. They can also reject a route that would otherwise be technically available. When the failure identifies an exceeded fee or delay requirement, record the attempted amount, route, and configured limits first.

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Increase a limit only when you understand the trade-off:

  • A higher fee ceiling can allow more routes but may make the payment materially more expensive.
  • A larger delay allowance can permit routes with longer timelocks, increasing the time funds may remain committed.
  • Changing limits will not improve destination reachability if the underlying problem is a missing or unusable channel.

After a controlled change, make one new attempt and compare its result with the original attempt. Keep the original failure object so you can tell whether the new route changed the limiting condition.

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8. Match commands to your Core Lightning release

Payment command behavior is changing. The current pay reference marks pay as deprecated in CLN v26.06 and says it is removed after v27.03. The same documentation says that, as of v26.06, xpay transparently handles most invocations that previously used pay.

Consequently, a command copied from an older guide may fail because the command, option name, or default behavior differs in your release. Before changing a script or runbook:

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  1. Record the exact CLN version installed on the node.
  2. Open the matching release documentation for pay, xpay, listpays, listsendpays, and waitsendpay.
  3. Confirm the accepted positional arguments and option names.
  4. Run the read-only inspection commands first and save their output.
  5. Only then modify the payment command or retry policy.

This version check is especially important for automation. A script that assumes the pre-v26.06 pay behavior can misclassify a command error as a routing failure, while a script written for a newer release may not run on an older node.

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9. A repeatable incident procedure

Use this sequence for a single failed payment and for repeated failures across several payments.

  1. Capture identifiers. Save the invoice string, payment hash, destination, amount, and the timestamp of the attempt.
  2. Check the aggregate state. Run listpays. If it is pending, do not label it failed; continue monitoring.
  3. Inspect attempts. Run listsendpays and identify every part and concurrent sendpay attempt for that payment.
  4. Wait for a final result. Use waitsendpay for a payment sent with sendpay. Treat a timeout as unresolved, not failed.
  5. Preserve the failure object. Record the erring hop, node, channel, and BOLT #4 code when they are present.
  6. Validate the invoice. Use listinvoices with the invoice or payment hash and check whether the invoice is still valid.
  7. Classify the cause. Separate expiry, no-route, fee/delay-limit, and hop-reported failures.
  8. Choose one targeted action. Request a new invoice, adjust an acceptable limit, try route iteration with xpay, or investigate channel availability.
  9. Retry only after the cause is understood. Keep the original records and compare the new attempt with them.

10. Common diagnostic mistakes

Calling every timeout a failure

A waiting client can time out while the payment remains pending. Always verify the CLN state with listpays.

Looking only at the payment-level record

The aggregate record hides the distinction between parts and attempts. Use listsendpays when the top-level status does not explain what happened.

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Retrying an expired invoice

An invoice-expiry error requires a new invoice. More route attempts cannot change its validity.

Opening a channel without reading the failure

More channels can improve route availability, but they do not correct fee or delay limits and do not guarantee success. Identify the failed hop and code first.

Using an obsolete command example

The pay-to-xpay transition makes release-specific documentation essential. Verify the installed version before copying a command or option.

11. Interpreting repeated failures

For one payment, concentrate on its invoice and attempts. For a pattern across many payments, compare the failure objects rather than counting failures without context. Repeated errors at the same hop suggest a peer or channel-specific issue; failures that occur before a usable route is selected point toward route availability or local constraints; invoice-expiry errors across unrelated payments usually indicate stale invoice handling in the application that creates or queues payments.

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There is no single documented failure-rate percentage that can tell you whether your node is behaving normally. The actionable evidence is the state, attempt, hop, code, invoice status, and configured limits for each payment.

12. The shortest safe decision tree

  • Is listpays pending? Wait and poll; do not issue a duplicate payment.
  • Is it complete? Stop troubleshooting that payment and reconcile the recipient or application if it still reports a problem.
  • Is it failed? Inspect listsendpays and the waitsendpay failure object.
  • Does the failure identify invoice expiry? Obtain a new invoice.
  • Does it identify fee or delay limits? Review those limits and the cost of relaxing them.
  • Does it identify a route or hop failure? Examine the reported channel, try the supported route-iteration behavior, and assess whether additional channel diversity is justified.

This order prevents the most expensive diagnostic mistakes: paying twice while a payment is pending, trying to route an expired invoice, and changing node topology before understanding the failure that CLN already reported.

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