Dead Letter Queues

Last updated Oct 12, 2026 A Dead Letter Queue (DLQ) is a common concept in a messaging system, and represents where messages are sent when a delivery failure occurs with a consumer after max_retries is reached. A Dead Letter Queue is like any other queue, and can be produced to and consumed from independently.

With Cloudflare Queues, a Dead Letter Queue is defined within your consumer configuration. Messages are delivered to the DLQ when they reach the configured retry limit for the consumer. Without a DLQ configured, messages that reach the retry limit are deleted permanently.

The DLQ must use the same jurisdiction as its source queue. If you specify a queue name that does not exist as the DLQ, Cloudflare automatically creates that queue in the same jurisdiction as the source queue.

For example, the following consumer configuration would send messages to our DLQ named "my-other-queue" after retrying delivery (by default, 3 times):

{
    "queues": {
        "consumers": [
            {
                "queue": "my-queue",
                "dead_letter_queue": "my-other-queue"
            }
        ]
    }
}

[[queues.consumers]]
queue = "my-queue"
dead_letter_queue = "my-other-queue"

You can also configure a DLQ when creating a consumer from the command-line using wrangler:

wrangler queues consumer add $QUEUE_NAME $SCRIPT_NAME --dead-letter-queue=$NAME_OF_OTHER_QUEUE

To process messages placed on your DLQ, you need to configure a consumer for that queue as you would with any other queue.

Messages delivered to a DLQ without an active consumer will persist for four (4) days before being deleted from the queue.

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