diff --git a/design/20220118.certificate-issuance-exponential-backoff.md b/design/20220118.certificate-issuance-exponential-backoff.md
index 4efa01852..6f5562390 100644
--- a/design/20220118.certificate-issuance-exponential-backoff.md
+++ b/design/20220118.certificate-issuance-exponential-backoff.md
@@ -211,6 +211,8 @@ To ensure that `Certificate`s whose issuance is currently failing don't get rene
 
 - In case of exponential backoff being applied, controller logs will be sufficient for users trying to debug this and understand when the next issuance will be attempted
 
+- Applying exponential backoff in cases where issuance fails due to a denied `CertificateRequest` should not be treated differently to other failures (so exponential backoff should be applied). Currently they are treated the same and retried after 1 hour, so this is consistent with the existing behaviour
+
 ## Feature Gate
 
 The current assumption is that exponential backoff would _not_ be placed behind a feature gate, however this should be considered.