generated: '2026-09-07'
method: searched
source: >-
  https://www.state.gov/robots.txt, live response headers from
  https://www.state.gov/wp-json/wp/v2/* and https://history.state.gov/api/v1/catalog,
  https://history.state.gov/developer/catalog
provider: Department of State
providerId: department-of-state
limit_count: 0
summary: >-
  The Department of State publishes no rate limits for any of its public API surfaces, and returns no
  rate-limit response headers. An honest zero: there is no number to record, not a number we failed
  to find. The only throttling signal the Department publishes anywhere is a crawl-delay directive in
  robots.txt, which is advisory and applies to crawlers rather than API clients.
  This file replaces a scaffold written by the 2026-05-04 bulk sweep, which invented free /
  professional / enterprise tiers with per-minute and per-month quotas. The Department has no tiers,
  no API keys and no quotas. Those numbers were never published by anyone.
limits: []
headers:
  limit: null
  remaining: null
  reset: null
  retryAfter: null
  policy: null
  note: >-
    No X-RateLimit-*, RateLimit-* or Retry-After header was present on any response observed on
    2026-09-07, on either www.state.gov/wp-json or history.state.gov/api/v1/catalog.
responseCodes:
  throttled: null
  note: >-
    No 429 was observed and none is documented. Requests that the www.state.gov WAF objects to are
    refused with HTTP 403 and an HTML "Technical Difficulties" page, not a 429 — see
    errors/department-of-state-problem-types.yml.
published_signals:
  - source: https://www.state.gov/robots.txt
    directive: 'crawl-delay: 5'
    scope: crawlers
    note: >-
      The only quantitative pacing guidance the Department publishes. It is a robots.txt directive,
      not an API limit, and it is not enforced on wp-json.
  - source: https://history.state.gov/developer/catalog
    directive: >-
      "Please link back to the ebooks files on this server, so that readers can always receive the
      most up-to-date version."
    scope: Office of the Historian Ebook Catalog API
    note: >-
      An attribution and freshness request rather than a limit. The Office of the Historian states no
      quota and requires no key.
guidance_for_consumers: >-
  Absent a published limit, treat every State host conservatively: honour the robots.txt crawl-delay
  of 5 seconds as a floor, keep concurrency at 1, and use the _fields parameter to avoid pulling
  760KB pages of rendered HTML you do not need. Note that travel.state.gov, step.state.gov and
  cadatacatalog.state.gov sit behind a Cloudflare challenge that refuses non-browser clients outright
  — that is a bot policy, not a rate limit, and retrying will not clear it.
maintainers:
  - FN: Kin Lane
    email: kin@apievangelist.com