Cloudflare Fundamentals – Retry-After HTTP header for retryable 1xxx errors

Cloudflare-generated 1xxx error responses now include a standard Retry-After HTTP header when the error is retryable. Agents and HTTP clients can read the recommended wait time from response headers alone — no body parsing required.

Changes

Seven retryable error codes now emit Retry-After:

Error code Retry-After (seconds) Error name
1004 120 DNS resolution error
1005 120 Banned zone
1015 30 Rate limited
1033 120 Argo Tunnel error
1038 60 HTTP headers limit exceeded
1200 60 Cache connection limit
1205 5 Too many redirects

The header value matches the existing retry_after body field in JSON and Markdown responses.

If a WAF rate limiting rule has already set a dynamic Retry-After value on the response, that value takes precedence.

Availability

Available for all zones on all plans.

Verify

Check for the header on any retryable error:

curl -s --compressed -D - -o /dev/null -H "Accept: application/json" -A "TestAgent/1.0" -H "Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate" "<YOUR_DOMAIN>/cdn-cgi/error/1015" | grep -i retry-after

References:

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