Hosted Invoice Page

The URL appears at finalization, not at creation

A draft Stripe invoice has no hosted page. The Invoice object reference is explicit on both of the customer-facing links: hosted_invoice_url is "the URL for the hosted invoice page, which allows customers to view and pay an invoice", and invoice_pdf is "the link to download the PDF for the invoice". Of each, Stripe says the same thing: "If the invoice has not been finalized yet, this will be null."

That timing is more useful than it looks. Finalization is the point at which a Stripe invoice stops being editable and becomes something a customer owes. So the existence of a hosted invoice URL is a quick, reliable signal that you are looking at a real receivable rather than a draft someone is still working on.

It also explains a common support question. If a customer says the link in their email does not work and the invoice in your Dashboard is still a draft, nothing is broken. There is no page yet to link to.

The link expires, and the expiry is not what most people assume

Stripe states the rule precisely: "Invoice URLs expire 30 days after the due date. If the invoice doesn’t have a due date, the invoice expires 30 days after it finalizes. In all cases, the expiration window is never longer than 120 days."

Read the last sentence twice. Even an invoice with terms of 180 days does not get a link that lasts 210 days. The ceiling is 120.

What happens after expiry depends on who is asking. A customer following an expired link is redirected to a page that says the URL has expired and gives your business contact information. Where the invoice was sent by email, Stripe instead sends them to a recovery page where they can enter their email address and receive a new copy of the original email with working links. Stripe also guarantees that any URL the Dashboard displays, or that you retrieve through the API, stays valid for at least 10 days even after expiration.

One case behaves differently. Stripe says that when a non-browser client such as a script requests an expired PDF download URL, it returns a 400 error with a URL expired body rather than a redirect, so an integration can detect the expiry and re-request the invoice for a fresh URL.

The practical lesson for anyone keeping records: the invoice does not expire, the link does. Store the invoice number or ID, and fetch a current link when you need one.

Partial payments change how many payments one invoice produces

By default, the hosted invoice page collects one payment for the amount due. Stripe does support partial payments on the page, but it is a setting you turn on: to accept partial payments on the hosted invoice page, you enable them in the Invoice settings page of the Dashboard.

Once enabled, a customer can pay a custom amount toward the invoice rather than the full balance at once. Stripe records each payment on the invoice, updates the amount paid and amount remaining as payments succeed, and moves the invoice to paid only when it is fully paid. In the meantime your customer sees the remaining amount and a partially paid status in their customer portal.

For your books, that means one invoice can be settled by several payments on different days. Before you switch it on, check how those payments will reach your accounting system, because a flow built around one invoice and one payment is not the same as a flow that has to apply three payments to one receivable.

There is a related trap Stripe documents. If an invoice has more than one open payment, it is possible to overpay it, and Stripe credits any excess to the customer’s credit balance rather than refunding it.

When customers pay somewhere other than the page

Not every invoice is paid through its hosted page. A customer might send a wire or a check against a Stripe invoice, and someone on your team then marks the invoice as paid in the Dashboard.

That is a legitimate workflow, but it is a different event from a payment on the page. Stripe even tracks it separately on the invoice, as the amount paid outside of Stripe. The money went straight to your bank, so the invoice says paid while nothing arrives in your Stripe balance or in a Stripe payout.

This is the reason to decide deliberately how paid-outside-Stripe invoices should appear in your books, rather than discovering later that your receivables and your Stripe payouts disagree about the same customer.