ServiceNow · Rate Limits

Servicenow Rate Limits

ServiceNow's REST API rate limits are configured per instance by ServiceNow administrators via System Web Services > REST > API rate-limiting rules. There is no globally-published, fixed numeric limit; thresholds, scope (per user / role / IP), and warning/violation behavior are tenant-specific. When a rule fires, the API responds with HTTP 429 and a Retry-After header. Public ServiceNow product documentation describes the mechanism but not numeric defaults, and the docs.servicenow.com site is not directly reachable from public crawlers.

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

It captures 1 rate-limit definition, measuring requests_per_hour.

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

Tagged areas include ITSM, Now Platform, and Rate Limiting.

1 Limits Throttle: 429
ITSMNow PlatformRate Limiting

Limits

Per-instance configurable rate-limit rule instance/user-or-role
requests_per_hour
see instance configuration
Administrators define numeric thresholds per user, per role, or per request URI. Default sample rules ship with the platform but are not a contractual SLA.

Policies

Configurable rule engine
Rate limits are policies in the customer's instance, editable by admins. They can be applied per user, per role, per integration user, and per URI pattern, with separate warning vs violation thresholds.
429 + Retry-After
When a violation rule fires, ServiceNow returns HTTP 429 with a Retry-After header indicating seconds until the rule's window resets.
Disclosure
Specific numeric thresholds are tenant-internal and disclosed to integrators by the customer's ServiceNow admin team, not publicly.
Backoff
Honor Retry-After; apply exponential backoff with jitter on repeated 429s.

Sources