How to Fix "Swap Failed" on Uniswap

The swap failed message on Uniswap means the trade was attempted and rejected, not that your funds went anywhere. They are still in your wallet. Work through the checks below in order and stop at the first one that applies - retrying the same swap unchanged only costs you another fee.

Start with the cheap checks

Disconnect the wallet and reconnect it, refresh the page, and make sure you are on the official Uniswap app rather than a lookalike that a search result sent you to. A stale connection genuinely causes this, and it costs nothing to rule out. Then check that you hold enough ETH, or the fee coin of whichever network you are on, on top of the tokens you are trading.

Raise slippage, but only a little

Slippage tolerance is how far the price may move against you before the swap cancels itself. The default is deliberately tight. Nudging it from 0.5% to 1% is reasonable on a quiet token; a few percent may be needed for one that charges a fee on every transfer. Do not set it to 10 or 20 to force the trade through - a wide tolerance is exactly what lets a bot sandwich your trade and sell you a far worse price. If a token will only swap at very high slippage, that is information, not an obstacle to remove.

Redo the approval

Each token needs a signed permission before Uniswap can move it. Approvals sometimes end up stale, partial, or set to an amount smaller than your trade. Revoking the old approval and granting a fresh one clears a surprising number of stubborn failures. Trying a slightly different amount can help too.

When the token itself is the problem

Some tokens are written so that only the creator can sell. You can buy freely, and every attempt to swap back fails no matter what you change. If a token fails at every slippage setting and the pool clearly holds liquidity, treat that as the answer and stop spending gas on it.

Change one variable per attempt, and read the explorer entry after each failure rather than guessing. Why a swap fails explains the causes behind these fixes, and why a transaction fails covers what the failed status on the explorer actually means.