202 Accepted

Success: the request was received, understood and accepted.

When a server should send it. When the request is valid and queued but not done, so the server cannot yet say whether it will succeed. Give the client a way to follow up: a status URL in the body or a Location header, or a promise of a webhook.

Common causes. Queued jobs: video encoding, bulk imports, report generation.

What to do. Poll the status address the API gives you, or wait for its webhook.

Browsers and HTTP clients. Clients treat it as success. There is no built-in polling, so the client must check the status address the API gives.

Google Search. Googlebot waits a limited time for the content, then passes on whatever it received for indexing. Source: Google Search Central, How HTTP status codes, and network and DNS errors affect Google Search.

Caching. Not cacheable by default (RFC 9110 section 15.1 does not list it). A cache stores it only when the response says so with Cache-Control or Expires.

HTTP/1.1 202 Accepted
Location: /api/jobs/77/status
Content-Type: application/json

{"status": 202, "title": "Accepted"}

location /example {
    return 202 'Accepted';
}

http_response_code(202);
echo 'Accepted';
exit;

res.writeHead(202, { 'Content-Type': 'text/plain' });
res.end('Accepted');

# in a view function
return 'Accepted', 202