# How to pause payment collection or cancel subscriptions

### To pause or cancel subscriptions, you can use the API or Dashboard. When pausing, you can choose to pause indefinitely or set a custom date, and select invoice behaviour based on your business needs. When cancelling, you can choose to end the subscription immediately, at the end of the period or on a custom day, but bear in mind that reactivating may impact MRR and subscriber churn metrics.
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### Pausing subscriptions
When creating a new subscription and adding a trial, you can choose to [pause the subscription if the trial ends without a payment method](https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/trials#create-free-trials-without-payment). At this time, this is the only way to change the subscription status to "paused". If you would like to keep a subscription active, but temporarily pause payment collection, see below.
### Pausing payment collection for subscriptions
If you wish to keep the the subscription status unchanged (i.e. "active"), but temporarily pause collecting payment, you can pause payment collection for an existing subscription through the [API](https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/pausing) or in the [Dashboard](https://dashboard.stripe.com/subscriptions).
When viewing an existing subscription in the Dashboard, click the three dots at the top right to pause payment collection.
* You can pause it indefinitely or choose a custom date.
* You can also select the invoice behaviour.
  * Keep invoices as drafts: for businesses offering services but delaying payment collection.
  * Mark invoices uncollectible: for businesses offering services for free.
  * Void invoices: for businesses not offering services.
Once you are ready to resume collecting payments for the subscription, click Resume payment collection.
We have also included an option to pause all active subscriptions at once with the same parameters as above in your [Billing settings](https://dashboard.stripe.com/settings/billing/automatic).
### Cancelling subscriptions
You can cancel subscriptions through the [API](https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/canceling#canceling) or in the Dashboard. Once you open the subscription, you can choose to **Cancel subscription** in the drop-down menu.
When you click **Cancel subscription...**, you will be able to choose when to end the subscription: immediately, at the end of the period or on a custom day.
Bear in mind that if you are planning to reactivate them later, this might affect monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and subscriber churn metrics. You can read more about cancelling subscriptions in our [docs](https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/canceling).