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.
3 Limits
Throttle: 429
Rate LimitingSpreadsheetsMicrosoft GraphMicrosoft
Limits
Excel — any request, per app per tenant app/tenant
1500
Excel — any request, per app across all tenants application
5000
Microsoft Graph global ceiling application
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.