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: USDA Food and Nutrition Administration
providerId: usda-snap
created: '2026-07-03'
modified: '2026-07-03'
reconciled: false
tags:
- SNAP
- USDA
- Government Data
- ArcGIS
- Rate Limiting
- Quotas
description: >-
  The SNAP Retailer Location Data API is a free, anonymous, read-only Esri
  ArcGIS hosted Feature Service. USDA FNA does not publish a documented
  numeric per-account or per-IP request-rate limit for this service - no API
  key, quota, or tiering is required or offered. The only confirmed,
  documented ceiling is Esri's per-request `maxRecordCount` of 1,000 records,
  which callers work around with `resultOffset`/`resultRecordCount`
  pagination across the ~254,048 nationwide retailer records (count
  confirmed live via `returnCountOnly=true` on the review date). As a shared
  ArcGIS Online-hosted service, USDA's own platform capacity (and standard
  Esri/Cloudflare-level abuse protections) could still throttle or block
  clients that issue an unreasonably high request volume, but no published
  threshold exists for that behavior.
notes: >-
  Treat this as a courtesy-use public dataset: page responsibly with
  resultOffset/resultRecordCount, cache results locally, and prefer bulk
  export (CSV/Shapefile/GeoJSON/KML from the ArcGIS Hub item page) over
  high-frequency polling for full-refresh use cases.
sources:
- https://www.fna.usda.gov/snap/retailer-locator
- https://services1.arcgis.com/RLQu0rK7h4kbsBq5/arcgis/rest/services/snap_retailer_location_data/FeatureServer
- https://usda-snap-retailers-usda-fns.hub.arcgis.com/datasets/USDA-FNS::snap-retailer-location-data/
- https://developers.arcgis.com/rest/services-reference/enterprise/query-feature-service-layer/
responseCodes:
  throttled: not published
limits:
- name: Per-Request Record Limit
  scope: request
  metric: records
  limit: '1000'
  notes: Confirmed live maxRecordCount on the snap_retailer_location_data layer; page with resultOffset/resultRecordCount to retrieve more.
- name: API Key / Authentication
  scope: account
  metric: requests
  limit: not required
  notes: The service is queried anonymously; no API key, token, or registration is needed.
- name: Request Rate
  scope: client
  metric: requests per minute
  limit: not published
  notes: No documented numeric request-rate ceiling; standard ArcGIS Online platform capacity applies.
policies:
- name: Pagination
  description: Use resultOffset and resultRecordCount (max 1,000 per page) to walk the full ~254,048-record nationwide dataset.
- name: Bulk Export Preference
  description: For full-dataset refreshes, use the ArcGIS Hub item's CSV/Shapefile/GeoJSON/KML export rather than repeated paginated queries.
- name: Read-Only
  description: The layer's only capability is Query - no create, update, or delete operations are exposed publicly.
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
  email: kin@apievangelist.com