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Still Returning 200 for Every API Error? I Did for 2 Years

Clients, retries and monitoring all trust status codes, so here is what to return instead, with working examples.

Mahad Nadeem

8 min read1 day ago

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Our dashboard said 100% success. Our customers said checkout was broken.

Both were telling the truth, because every failed request had come back as 200 OK.

I spent two years writing APIs that way. Every endpoint returned 200, and the body said whether things worked: { "success": false, "error": "Order not found" } . It felt friendly. The client never had to deal with HTTP errors, and I never had to remember which code meant what.

It also quietly broke everything that reads status codes first: retries, caches, monitoring, API clients, even other developers’ patience. Here is what I return now for seven situations that cover most real APIs, with Express examples you can paste.

Start with the shape every error should share.

1.…