Microsoft Excel · Rate Limits

Microsoft Excel Rate Limits

The Microsoft Excel REST API is delivered through Microsoft Graph workbook endpoints and is throttled per (application, tenant) by the Excel service. Limits apply to all workbook requests regardless of the underlying Microsoft 365 plan. Returns 429 Too Many Requests with a Retry-After header.

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

It captures 3 rate-limit definitions, measuring requests_per_10_seconds.

Limit state is signalled in the retryAfter, requestId, throttleScope, and throttleLimit response headers, and an exhausted limit returns HTTP 429.

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 and serviceUnavailable.

Tagged areas include Rate Limiting, Spreadsheets, Microsoft Graph, and Microsoft.

3 Limits Exhausted: HTTP 429 retryAfterrequestIdthrottleScopethrottleLimit
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.
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Rate LimitingSpreadsheetsMicrosoft GraphMicrosoft

Limits

Excel — any request, per app per tenant app/tenant
requests_per_10_seconds · second
1500
Excel — any request, per app across all tenants application
requests_per_10_seconds · second
5000
Microsoft Graph global ceiling application
requests_per_10_seconds · second
130000
Hard global ceiling per app across all Microsoft Graph services

Policies

Persist sessions
Re-use the workbook-session-id header across calls; non-persisting sessions are limited to ~5 minutes and create unnecessary recompute.
Batch requests
Use $batch on Microsoft Graph to combine up to 20 workbook calls per round-trip. Each batched call counts individually toward the limit but reduces network overhead.
Backoff Strategy
Honour the Retry-After header on 429; exponential backoff with jitter otherwise.
Avoid recompute storms
Set workbook calculation mode to manual for bulk writes, then trigger calculate at the end.

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

curl for this page
This rate limit 
curl "https://apis.io/api/v1/rate-limits/microsoft-excel-rate-limits"
All rate limits 
curl "https://apis.io/api/v1/rate-limits?limit=25"

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