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: Bureau of Consular Affairs
providerId: bureau-of-consular-affairs
generated: '2026-09-05'
method: searched
source: >-
  https://cadatacatalog.state.gov/ ; https://services6.arcgis.com/R6wlO6UHmSzqm9Vs/arcgis/rest/services ;
  live probes 2026-09-05
created: '2026-05-04'
modified: '2026-09-05'
limit_count: 0
limits: []
headers: {}
responseCodes: {}
description: >-
  The Bureau of Consular Affairs publishes no rate limits for any surface, and none could be observed.
  No X-RateLimit-*, RateLimit-* or Retry-After header is documented anywhere, and no 429 contract is
  stated. limit_count 0 is an honest zero: the bureau has not written the limits down.
note: >-
  This file previously carried a five-row Free / Professional / Enterprise scaffold written by the
  2026-05-04 bulk sweep — 10, 100 and 1,000 requests per minute against invented monthly quotas, plus
  a full set of X-RateLimit-* response headers the API does not send. None of it was published by the
  bureau. Replaced 2026-09-05 with what is actually knowable.
undocumented_but_observed:
  - surface: cadatacatalog.state.gov (CKAN Action API)
    finding: >-
      Not a rate limit but the wall a consumer actually hits — the host is fronted by a Cloudflare WAF
      that returned HTTP 403 "Sorry, you have been blocked" to every request from this pipeline on
      2026-09-05, including the plain CKAN action /api/3/action/status_show, on both HTTP and HTTPS
      and across four different User-Agent strings. This is a categorical block, not throttling: it
      does not relent with backoff and it is applied before any quota is consulted.
    evidence:
      - url: https://cadatacatalog.state.gov/api/3/action/package_list
        status: 403
        fetched: '2026-09-05'
  - surface: travel.state.gov
    finding: >-
      The same Cloudflare WAF blocks every page path with 403, but the /_res/rss/ feed paths are
      exempt and returned 200 (1.1 MB, 216 items) on the same run.
    evidence:
      - url: https://travel.state.gov/_res/rss/TAsTWs.xml
        status: 200
        fetched: '2026-09-05'
      - url: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/rss.html
        status: 403
        fetched: '2026-09-05'
ceilings:
  - surface: ArcGIS Feature Services
    kind: page-size
    field: maxRecordCount
    limit: 2000
    unit: features per query
    truncation_signal: exceededTransferLimit
    detail: >-
      Declared in the service's own descriptor and enforced per query. Not a rate limit — it caps one
      response, not a request rate — but it is the only hard, provider-published numeric ceiling on
      any surface in this profile, and a consumer must page with resultOffset / resultRecordCount to
      get past it.
    evidence:
      - url: https://services6.arcgis.com/R6wlO6UHmSzqm9Vs/arcgis/rest/services/Travel_Advisory_Levels__(2024)_View_Layer/FeatureServer/54
        status: 200
        fetched: '2026-09-05'
tags:
  - Federal Government
  - Open Data
  - Rate Limiting
maintainers:
  - FN: Kin Lane
    email: kin@apievangelist.com