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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-12T17:24:33+00:00

I couldn’t find a definitive answer from the PayPal docs on this. According to

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I couldn’t find a definitive answer from the PayPal docs on this.

According to the docs:

The PNREF returned in the original transaction is valid in reference transactions for
12 months.

I want to avoid requiring my customers re-enter their credit card information every 12 months.

So what I want to do is to do a zero-dollar authorization to store an initial PNREF, and then update the PNREF value for that customer every time they do a reference transaction. So as long as the customer doesn’t go for 12 straight months with no transactions, they won’t have to re-enter their card information.

Having trouble finding an answer to whether or not that’s possible via Google. Does anyone know if you can use the PNREF from a reference transaction as the ORIGID for another reference transaction?

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  1. Editorial Team

    Well I went ahead and tried it out, and I am able to use the PNREF of a reference transaction as the ORIGID in another reference transaction.

    Now the million dollar question is, will this still work a year after the zero dollar authorization? Guess I’ll let you know in about a year…

    One year later…

    It’s been a year, and this has been working successfully for us. We originally save the customer’s credit card info using a zero-dollar authorization (ZDA). Later, we do a reference transaction (call it T1) with the ZDA’s PNREF as the new transaction’s ORIGID.

    Some time later, when the customer wants to do another transaction (call it T2), we use T1’s PNREF as the new transaction’s ORIGID. We then store T2’s PNREF for use on the next transaction. So every time we do a transaction, we store the new PNREF for use on the next transaction.

    This is how we’ve been chaining the transactions, and we have confirmed (ourselves and by a representative over the phone) that as long as 12 months doesn’t go by without any transactions, we can keep chaining them indefinitely.

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