Amazon S3 · Rate Limits

Amazon S3 Rate Limits

Amazon S3 enforces request limits at the partitioned-prefix level inside a bucket - 3,500 PUT/COPY/POST/DELETE per second and 5,500 GET/HEAD per second per prefix - and scales nearly linearly by sharding across prefixes. Bucket-level operations (CreateBucket, DeleteBucket, etc.) follow the AWS API throttling envelope. Use exponential backoff with jitter on SlowDown (503) responses.

Amazon S3 Rate Limits is the machine-readable rate-limit profile for Amazon S3 on the APIs.io network, in the API Commons Rate Limits shape.

It captures 4 rate-limit definitions, measuring requests_per_second and count.

Limit state is signalled in the requestId and retryAfter response headers, and an exhausted limit returns HTTP 503.

This profile was written by API Evangelist and has not been verified against a page the provider published; treat every limit as unconfirmed until a dated transcription replaces it.

The profile also includes 4 backoff/retry policies defined and response codes documented for throttled, quotaExceeded, and serviceUnavailable.

Tagged areas include Rate Limiting, Object Storage, and S3.

4 Limits Exhausted: HTTP 503 Quota: 429 requestIdretryAfter
Method: generated, dated 2026-05-05.
Written by API Evangelist on 2026-05-05 and not verified against a page the provider published. Treat every limit as unconfirmed until a dated transcription replaces it.
View Source
Rate LimitingObject StorageS3

Limits

PUT/COPY/POST/DELETE per prefix bucket-prefix
requests_per_second · second
3500
Per partitioned prefix; shard across prefixes to scale linearly.
GET/HEAD per prefix bucket-prefix
requests_per_second · second
5500
Per partitioned prefix.
Bucket count per account account
count
10000
Soft limit; raisable via Service Quotas (default ranges 100 to 10,000).
S3 Express One Zone directory bucket bucket
requests_per_second
see S3 Express One Zone docs
Higher per-bucket limits (millions of requests/second) on Express One Zone.

Policies

Backoff on SlowDown
SlowDown (HTTP 503) responses indicate prefix-level throttling. Retry with exponential backoff and jitter; AWS SDKs default to standard retry mode.
Prefix sharding
For very high throughput, distribute keys across prefixes (e.g. random hash prefixes) to multiply throughput.
Multipart upload
For files larger than 100 MB, use multipart upload (parallel parts) to reduce wall-clock time and benefit from prefix-level concurrency.
Quota increases
Bucket-count, multipart upload, and bucket policy limits are soft and raisable via Service Quotas.

Sources

Work with this as data

Every rate limit here is available over the APIs.io API and to AI agents over MCP.

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Tools for rate limits

4 MCP tools reach this
  • find_rate_limitsBrowse and filter every rate limit in the catalog.
  • apis_io_searchSTART HERE — APIs, providers and tags for one query, each with its total.
  • resolveTurn a domain, URL or GitHub org into the provider it belongs to.
  • find_cohortsEvery scored population of providers in the catalog.
All 92 tools →

Call it yourself

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curl "https://apis.io/api/v1/rate-limits?limit=25"

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