You just received a payment on your PayPal account and noticed that it’s on hold, and yet to be on your PayPal balance, you don’t need to panic, we will explain different reasons why PayPal might hold your payment for 24hours, 7days or even 21 days, We will equally guide you on some necessary actions to take whenever your PayPal payment is on hold, how to prevent PayPal from holding our payment, etc, read on.

PayPal as Global payment system put in place some security measures to avert theft, money laundry, and fraud on its payment platform, this security measures surely affects the users and how their send, and receive payment, you might panic if any of the measures are implemented on your account mostly if you are new to PayPal, there are lots of security measures on PayPal, however, we will discuss the one that is responsible for holding of received payments. We will tell you:

1~Why the measures were taken

2~How To Get the money out if held

Why PayPal payment are held For 24 hours, 7 or 21 days

Here is a little breakdown of why your PayPal payment might be held for some hours days or even weeks.

1~ Why would PayPal hold payments? : like I said earlier PayPal holds received payments solely for security reasons, this might occur due to the recent activity on either the sending or the receiving account, PayPal will hold your received payment if:

~ The account you received the payment from is an unverified account, I e an account that doesn’t have a credit/debit card(ATM) linked to it, because of that PayPal doesn’t trust the sender just yet, so whenever he sends out payment it will be held for 24 hours for security checks.

~The Sender sent out the PayPal funds few hours after receiving the payment: In this case scenario, the sender hastily sent you the PayPal funds just a few hours after receiving the payment, to make sure it’s the sender that actually sent out the payment PayPal will hold the funds on your account for 24hours and will give you the reason for that as shown on the screenshot below

3~ You are new to PayPal: PayPal will also hold the payments you receive for 7days, or even 21 days if your PayPal account is new, that’s to so that you are a new seller, so PayPal will hold the first 2 to three payments that you receive on the new account for 7days or even 21 days for the UK account especially payments sent via Goods and services.

4~You received payment from a UK PayPal: PayPal seems to put a lot of security measures on UK accounts, especially when they send out the payment, most times when you receive payment as Goods or services from the UK account the fund will be held for as long as 21 days, their reason for such longer period of time is what I don’t know.

5~ Receive payment in a different currency or from a company account: When your receive payment from a company account or on a different currency PayPal will actually hold the payment and will need you to accept it, immediately you accept the payment it will be made available on your balance, however, if you fail to accept the payment after 30days it will be automatically returned to the sender

How To release your held PayPal payment

Some times you might be required to perform some confirmations to release your held PayPal payment, though that’s not always the case in all if PayPal needs you to confirm a received payment they will let you know

If the payment is held due to the age of your account PayPal will require that you confirm the delivery of the service paid for, if you have delivered the goods or service you then have to click on the “Get my Money” prompt beneath the held fund, then provide some shipping details for goods or select the date that you have delivered the paid service,

like I Said earlier it’s PayPal that will give you the go-ahead via your Email to provide those details, so always check your PayPal email whenever you receive payment. Example of the instruction email below

That’s all on why your PayPal payment is held for some hours, days or weeks, and how to release the funds, you should abide this PayPal best practices and always be in good terms with PayPal, if you are yet to own a PayPal account that sends and receive payment in Nigeria then download the free guide from here..

Remember to always check our updated exchange rates and exchange your PayPal funds with us

Best regards.