Open Dental · Rate Limits

Opendental Rate Limits

Open Dental throttles the cloud-hosted REST API by permission tier. An application holding only "Read All" permission is limited to roughly one request every 5 seconds, while higher tiers (for example, those including ApiComm) are allowed roughly one request per second. Requests made through the Local API or the API Service are NOT throttled at all, because they execute at the dental office workstation against the running Open Dental program and never travel through Open Dental's servers. The service returns 429 TooManyRequests when too many requests are queued (retry after the Retry-After header) and 504 Gateway Timeout when a request does not finish within the 60-second processing limit.

Opendental Rate Limits is the machine-readable rate-limit profile for Open Dental on the APIs.io network, conforming to the API Commons Rate Limits specification.

It captures 4 rate-limit definitions, measuring requests and seconds.

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

Tagged areas include Dental, Practice Management, Healthcare, Rate Limiting, and Quotas.

4 Limits Throttle: 429
DentalPractice ManagementHealthcareRate LimitingQuotas

Limits

Read-Only Tier application
requests
~1 request / 5 seconds
Applies when the application holds only "Read All" permission.
Higher Permission Tier application
requests
~1 request / second
Applies to tiers with elevated permissions such as ApiComm.
Local API / API Service workstation
requests
not throttled
Requests run locally against the on-premises Open Dental program; they do not pass through Open Dental servers.
Request Processing Time request
seconds
60 second cap
A request that does not complete within 60 seconds returns 504 Gateway Timeout.

Policies

Retry-After
On a 429 TooManyRequests response, wait the number of seconds given in the Retry-After header before retrying.
Permission-Scaled Throughput
Effective request rate rises with the permission tier granted to the application; request only the permissions you need.
Prefer Local API for Volume
For high-volume or latency-sensitive workloads at a single location, use the un-throttled Local API / API Service instead of the cloud API.
Backoff Strategy
Clients should implement exponential backoff with jitter and honor Retry-After on 429 responses.

Sources