HTTP 200 OK

What HTTP 200 means

The standard success response. For GET it carries the requested resource, for POST the result of the action. 200 is the right default, but more specific codes help clients: 201 when something was created, 204 when there is no body, and 206 for partial content.

Using 200 correctly

• Don’t return 200 with {"error": "..."} in the body. Monitoring, caches, retries and client libraries all rely on the status code to detect failures.
• A 200 response to GET is cacheable by default unless headers like Cache-Control say otherwise.

Retrying

Not applicable: this isn’t an error.

Example response

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 21 Oct 2026 10:30:00 GMT
Content-Type: application/json

How to return 200

res.status(200).json(result);

@app.post("/items", status_code=200)
def create_item(item: Item):
    return item

w.Header().Set("Content-Type", "application/json")
w.WriteHeader(http.StatusOK)
json.NewEncoder(w).Encode(result)

Related status codes

• 201 Created : The request succeeded and a new resource was created.
• 204 No Content : The request succeeded and there is no response body.
• 304 Not Modified : Tells the client its cached copy is still valid, so no body is sent.

Other 2xx status codes

201 Created · 202 Accepted · 203 Non-Authoritative Information · 204 No Content · 205 Reset Content · 206 Partial Content · 207 Multi-Status

See the full list of HTTP status codes.

Sources

• RFC 9110, section 200
• IANA HTTP Status Code Registry
• MDN: 200 OK

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Frequently asked questions