HTTP Status Codes cheat sheet

What each family means and which code to expect in a negative test.

Success

200 OK

Request succeeded with a body

201 Created

Resource created — expect a Location header

202 Accepted

Async processing started

204 No Content

Success with an empty body, typical for DELETE

301 / 302

Permanent / temporary redirect

304 Not Modified

Cache still valid

400 Bad Request

Malformed or invalid payload

401 vs 403

401 = not authenticated, 403 = authenticated but not allowed

404 / 409 / 422

Missing / conflict / semantically invalid

429 Too Many Requests

Rate limited — check Retry-After

500

Unhandled server error — always a defect

502 / 503 / 504

Often infrastructure, not application code

Bad gateway / unavailable / gateway timeout

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