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: TIAA
providerId: tiaa
created: '2026-05-04'
# Provenance stamped 2026-08-11: this artifact was written by the API Evangelist
# bulk sweep dated 2026-05-04, not harvested from the provider. See roadmap#35.
method: generated
modified: '2026-05-05'
reconciled: false
tags:
  - Finance
  - Retirement
  - Rate Limiting
description: TIAA does not publish a public rate-limits page. Throughput, concurrency, and burst caps
  for the FDX, Secure Income Account, Gateway, and Payroll360 APIs are defined in the partner contract
  and provisioned per integration.
sources:
  - https://www.tiaa.org/public/about-tiaa/working-at-tiaa/api-developer
notes: No public rate-limits documentation; numbers are contract-defined. Headers and response codes
  below cannot be confirmed without partner sandbox access.
responseCodes:
  throttled: 429
limits:
  - name: Contracted Rate Limit
    scope: contract
    metric: varies
    limit: see partner agreement
policies:
  - name: Contract-Defined Limits
    description: Per-partner throughput and concurrency caps are issued by TIAA's API onboarding team
      and may differ between sandbox and production environments.
  - name: Backoff Strategy
    description: Standard practice for TIAA's FDX-aligned endpoints is exponential backoff on 429/503
      responses, honoring Retry-After when present.
maintainers:
  - FN: Kin Lane
    email: kin@apievangelist.com