Every Airtable API limit, in one table

Airtable limits API use in two ways. The rate limit applies on every plan: 5 requests per second per base, plus 50 requests per second for all traffic from one user's (or service account's) personal access tokens. Exceed either and you get HTTP 429 and must wait 30 seconds before requests succeed again. The monthly call limit applies on the Free and Team plans only: 1,000 API calls per workspace per month on Free and 100,000 on Team. Business and Enterprise Scale have no monthly cap, and only the per-base rate limit applies.

Write throughput comes from the two limits together. Create, update and delete calls take up to 10 records each, so the documented ceiling is about 50 records per second per base. Reads return at most 100 records per page. Plan limits also cap how much data a base can hold: 1,000 records per base on Free, 50,000 on Team and 125,000 on Business, with matching attachment storage caps.

Values come from Airtable's developer reference and support center, verified November 12, 2026. Airtable says it may change the enforced limits or tier them by plan. Plan figures here are as of November 2026.

The two rate limits stack. A single integration writing to one base is capped by the per-base figure, while a tool that fans out across many bases with one person's tokens is capped by the per-token figure. Airtable's recommended response to a 429 is to back off and wait. The official airtable.js client has back-off and retry built in. For high read volume, Airtable suggests a caching proxy instead of more calls.

Monthly call limits are counted per workspace, by calendar month in UTC, and reset on the first day of each month. Every Web API call counts, including metadata and schema calls. Calls made by third-party integrations connected through your account count against the same quota. The two capped plans behave differently at the limit. Free calls are blocked after a one-time 30-day grace period, while Team calls are slowed rather than blocked.

Batching is the main throughput lever. Airtable's support documentation says batching handles up to 10 records per request, which at 5 requests per second means up to 50 records per second per base. List requests return pages of at most 100 records, and the whole URL must stay under 16,000 characters. That limit matters when long filterByFormula expressions are URL-encoded. Oversized bodies return 413.

These are base and workspace capacity limits rather than API limits, but they are what stops an integration that keeps adding rows. Record counts are per base and include all tables in it. Figures are from Airtable's plans article as of November 2026. Airtable does not publish numeric Enterprise Scale caps there, so they are omitted. Team trials have their own limits, listed on the same page.

Exceeding the per-base or per-token rate limit returns:

429 Too Many Requests
{
  "error": {
    "type": "RATE_LIMIT_REACHED",
    "message": "Rate limit exceeded. Please try again later"
  }
}

Requests succeed again after 30 seconds. Airtable advises integrations to back off and wait before retrying.

The monthly call limit works differently. On Free, after the one-time 30-day grace period, calls over 1,000 are blocked until the first of the next month. On Team, calls over 100,000 are not blocked but slow to 2 requests per second until the month resets. An oversized request body returns 413 Request Entity Too Large, and a base at its record limit can't accept new records until you delete some or upgrade.

Batch every write. Send 10 records per create, update or delete call; that alone is a 10x reduction in calls. Use upserts (performUpsert) instead of a read followed by a write.

Throttle to 5 per second per base with one shared queue per base, and on 429 pause a full 30 seconds. airtable.js does this for you.

Read less often. Fetch 100 records per page, filter server-side with filterByFormula, request only the fields you need, and cache results. Airtable itself recommends a caching proxy for heavy reads.

Watch the monthly meter. On Free and Team, polling integrations can use up the quota quietly. Lengthen polling intervals or upgrade to Business, which has no monthly cap.