OpenAI · Rate Limits

Openai Rate Limits

OpenAI throttles on five dimensions at once — requests per minute, requests per day, tokens per minute, tokens per day and images per minute, plus audio minutes per minute for streaming audio models — and whichever is hit first returns 429. The numbers themselves are per MODEL and per usage TIER, and OpenAI publishes them in two different places: the monthly usage ceiling is tabulated by tier in the rate-limits guide (recorded below), while RPM/TPM are published per model on the models page and are not tabulated by tier anywhere, so they are not reproduced here rather than guessed at. Tier advancement is automatic on cumulative spend. The runtime signal is good: nine x-ratelimit-* headers plus Retry-After, including a separate project-token triple, so an agent can pace itself without ever reading the docs.

Openai Rate Limits is the rate-limit profile for OpenAI on the APIs.io network — every limit transcribed verbatim from the provider’s own documentation on 2026-09-23.

It captures 6 rate-limit definitions, across the Free, Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3, and Tier 4 tiers, including Free tier monthly usage limit — free user must be in an allowed geography $100 / month; Tier 1 monthly usage limit — tier 1 $5 paid $100 / month; Tier 2 monthly usage limit — tier 2 $50 paid $500 / month.

Limit state is signalled in the limitRequests, limitTokens, remainingRequests, and remainingTokens response headers, and an exhausted limit returns HTTP 429.

The profile also includes 5 backoff/retry policies defined and response codes documented for throttled and slowDown.

Tagged areas include Rate Limiting and AI.

6 Limits Exhausted: HTTP 429 limitRequestslimitTokensremainingRequestsremainingTokens
Transcribed from the provider's documentation on 2026-09-23 — developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/rate-limits.md.
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Rate LimitingAI

Limits

Free tier monthly usage limit organization
free | user must be in an [allowed geography](https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/supported-countries) | $100 / month
usd_per_month · month
100
Tier 1 monthly usage limit organization
tier 1 | $5 paid | $100 / month
usd_per_month · month
100
Tier 2 monthly usage limit organization
tier 2 | $50 paid | $500 / month
usd_per_month · month
500
Tier 3 monthly usage limit organization
tier 3 | $100 paid | $1,000 / month
usd_per_month · month
1000
Tier 4 monthly usage limit organization
tier 4 | $250 paid | $5,000 / month
usd_per_month · month
5000
Tier 5 monthly usage limit organization
tier 5 | $1,000 paid | $200,000 / month
usd_per_month · month
200000

Policies

Automatic tier advancement
Tiers advance automatically once cumulative paid spend crosses the threshold. There is no application step.
Per-model limits
Each model carries its own RPM/TPM ceiling, summarised on the models page and shown for your organization at platform.openai.com/account/limits. OpenAI does not publish a tier-by-model matrix, so no per-model numbers are asserted in this artifact.
Above Tier 5
Custom limits beyond Tier 5 are arranged through OpenAI sales.
Backoff guidance
Honor Retry-After and back off exponentially on 429 rate-limit responses. A 503 "Slow Down" is different — it asks for a sustained rate reduction held for 15 minutes, not a per-request retry.
429 is overloaded
Five distinct conditions return 429 and only one is retryable. Read error.code before retrying. See errors/openai-problem-types.yml.

Sources

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

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