specification: API Commons Rate Limits
specificationVersion: '0.1'
schema: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/interface-research/main/schema/api-commons.yml#/$defs/RateLimits
provider: API Football
providerId: api-football
created: '2026-05-04'
generated: '2026-09-02'
modified: '2026-09-02'
method: searched
source: https://www.api-football.com/pricing
docs: https://www.api-football.com/documentation-v3#section/Rate-limit
tags:
  - Sports
  - Football
  - Soccer
  - Live Scores
  - Statistics
  - Rate Limiting
  - Quotas
description: >-
  Published request limits for the API-Football v3 API. THIS FILE REPLACES A
  2026-05-04 SCAFFOLD that carried invented per-minute ceilings (10/100/1000 rpm)
  and an invented 1,000-request monthly free quota. Those numbers were never
  published by API-Sports and have been removed. What remains is the provider's
  real metering unit — a DAILY request quota attached to the plan — plus an
  honest record of what we could not verify.
metering_unit: requests_per_day
reset:
  window: day
  at: '00:00 UTC'
  rollover: false
  detail: >-
    The daily allowance resets to zero at 00:00 UTC. Unused requests are lost;
    they do not roll over into the next day.
  verified: false
limits:
  - tier: free
    name: Free plan daily quota
    scope: api-key
    metric: requests_per_day
    limit: 100
    timeFrame: day
    price_usd_month: 0
    verified: false
    applies:
      - API-Football
  - tier: pro
    name: Pro plan daily quota
    scope: api-key
    metric: requests_per_day
    limit: 7500
    timeFrame: day
    price_usd_month: 19
    verified: false
    applies:
      - API-Football
  - tier: ultra
    name: Ultra plan daily quota
    scope: api-key
    metric: requests_per_day
    limit: 75000
    timeFrame: day
    price_usd_month: 29
    verified: false
    applies:
      - API-Football
  - tier: mega
    name: Mega plan daily quota
    scope: api-key
    metric: requests_per_day
    limit: 150000
    timeFrame: day
    price_usd_month: 39
    verified: false
    applies:
      - API-Football
  - tier: higher
    name: Highest published daily quota
    scope: api-key
    metric: requests_per_day
    limit: 1500000
    timeFrame: day
    price_usd_month: null
    verified: false
    note: >-
      The provider's pricing page advertises plans reaching 1,500,000 requests
      per day. The price attached to that tier was not captured.
    applies:
      - API-Football
limit_count: 5
headers:
  observed: []
  detail: >-
    NO rate-limit response headers were observed. Probes of
    https://v3.football.api-sports.io/status without a key (HTTP 403) and with a
    placeholder key (HTTP 200) returned no `RateLimit-*`, no `X-RateLimit-*` and
    no `Retry-After`. The provider documents a rate-limit section in its
    reference, but that page is served to our crawler as a Cloudflare managed
    challenge, so the runtime header names an agent would need could not be
    confirmed. They are left EMPTY rather than guessed — a wrong header name is
    worse than a recorded gap.
  verified: false
exhaustion_response:
  status: unknown
  detail: >-
    Not observed. Given the envelope contract (see
    conventions/api-football-conventions.yml) a quota-exhausted call would most
    plausibly arrive as HTTP 200 with a populated `errors` object rather than a
    429, but this was NOT verified and is not asserted.
  verified: false
policies:
  - name: Per-key metering
    description: >-
      The quota is attached to the API key / account, and one key spans every
      API-Sports sport surface. Spending the daily allowance on basketball spends
      it for football too.
    verified: false
  - name: Client-side caching is the documented mitigation
    description: >-
      The API sends `cache-control: private, no-store, no-cache`, so HTTP caching
      is off. The provider's own guidance (and its widgets' minimum 15-second
      `data-refresh`) push quota management onto the consumer.
    verified: true
evidence:
  - url: https://www.api-football.com/pricing
    status: 403
    note: >-
      cf-mitigated: challenge. Plan quotas above were recovered from search-engine
      extracts of this same provider page and of the provider's own guide at
      https://www.api-football.com/news/post/how-to-get-started-with-api-football-the-complete-beginners-guide;
      they could not be read directly and are flagged verified:false.
  - url: https://v3.football.api-sports.io/status
    status: 403
    note: no rate-limit headers present on the unauthenticated response
  - url: https://v3.football.api-sports.io/status
    status: 200
    note: >-
      with a placeholder x-apisports-key; still no rate-limit headers. Only
      `access-control-allow-headers: x-rapidapi-key, x-apisports-key,
      x-rapidapi-host` was returned.
maintainers:
  - FN: Kin Lane
    email: info@apievangelist.com