Rate Limits

Most of the Box APIs have rate limits in place in order to prevent misuse by third-party services or users.

Per API rate limits

There are currently a few distinct rate limits in place within the Box API.

• General API calls

  • 1000 API requests per minute, per user

• Uploads

  • 240 file upload requests per minute, per user

• Search

  • 6 searches per second, per user, to the search endpoint
  • Two additional limits are applied on top of the basic rate limit
  • 60 searches per minute, per user
  • 12 searches per second, per enterprise

Rate limit error

When an application hits a rate limit, the API will return an API response with a HTTP status code of 429 Too Many Requests.

The response will include the following headers and JSON body.

retry-after: 100

{
  "type": "error",
  "status": 429,
  "code": "rate_limit_exceeded",
  "help_url": "http://developers.box.com/docs/#errors",
  "message": "Request rate limit exceeded, please try again later",
  "request_id": "abcdef123456"
}

Please see the Client Error resource for more details.