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: Workday Business Processes
providerId: workday-business-processes
generated: '2026-09-17'
method: searched
source: https://developer.workday.com/doc/dan1370797408285.md
docs: https://developer.workday.com/doc/dan1370797408285.md
created: '2026-05-04'
modified: '2026-09-17'
supersedes: >-
  The 2026-05-04 bulk-sweep scaffold, which asserted free/professional/enterprise tiers with
  10/100/1000 requests-per-minute and X-RateLimit-* response headers. None of that was ever published
  by Workday. Replaced here with what the provider's own "Reference: Integrations, EIB, and Web Service
  Limits" page actually states.
tags:
  - Rate Limiting
  - Quotas
  - Throttling
description: >-
  Workday publishes service limits, not per-key rate limits. There is no requests-per-minute number for
  the Business Process REST API and no rate-limit response headers of any kind. What Workday does
  publish is a throttling posture (429 on REST, 500 on SOAP), volume ceilings that scale with customer
  size for extract interfaces, and a set of hard request/response boundaries.
headers:
  limit: null
  remaining: null
  reset: null
  retryAfter: null
  policy: null
headers_note: >-
  VERIFIED ABSENT. Workday documents no RateLimit-*, X-RateLimit-* or Retry-After contract, and the
  published OpenAPI declares no response headers on any operation. An agent gets no runtime budget
  signal at all — it learns it is throttled only by receiving a 429. This is the single biggest
  agent-readiness gap on this API.
responseCodes:
  throttled: 429
  quotaExceeded: 429
  serviceUnavailable: 500
limit_count: 7
limits:
  - name: REST / RaaS throttling under load
    scope: tenant
    metric: adaptive
    limit: null
    applies: [Business Process REST API v1, Custom Business Process Config v1]
    response: 429 Too Many Requests
    note: >-
      "Workday rejects API requests when other requests overload tenant resources." The threshold is
      not published and is explicitly adaptive to shared-tenant load, not a fixed per-key quota.
  - name: SOAP (Workday Web Services) throttling under load
    scope: tenant
    metric: adaptive
    limit: null
    applies: [Integrations v47.0 SOAP service]
    response: 500 Internal Service Error
    note: The 500 can mean "too many requests"; Workday advises retrying after a brief pause.
  - name: Invalid-request guardrail
    scope: tenant
    metric: invalid_requests
    limit: null
    response: 429
    note: >-
      "When a Workday integration or customer process generates an excessive volume of invalid
      requests, our system guardrails will temporarily rate-limit that specific traffic with an HTTP
      429 response." A client that loops on a 4xx will be throttled.
  - name: API extract requests — under 3,500 workers (ME)
    scope: tenant
    metric: requests
    limit: 75000
    timeFrame: 24h
    burst: 15000
    burst_timeFrame: 60m
    applies: [Reports-as-a-Service extract interfaces]
  - name: API extract requests — under 10,000 workers (LE)
    scope: tenant
    metric: requests
    limit: 100000
    timeFrame: 24h
    burst: 30000
    burst_timeFrame: 60m
  - name: API extract requests — under 100,000 workers (LE)
    scope: tenant
    metric: requests
    limit: 250000
    timeFrame: 24h
    burst: 75000
    burst_timeFrame: 60m
  - name: API extract requests — more than 100,000 workers
    scope: tenant
    metric: requests
    limit: 350000
    timeFrame: 24h
    burst: 100000
    burst_timeFrame: 60m
boundaries:
  - {name: Collection page size, value: 'limit default 20, maximum 100', source: openapi}
  - {name: Paged-request cache retention, value: 2 hours between paged requests, note: page 1 builds the cache and is slower; do not set a tight HTTP timeout on it}
  - {name: Attachment / image size, value: 30 MB, applies: [SOAP, REST]}
  - {name: HTTP header size, value: 16 KB}
  - {name: Web service response size, value: 1,000,000 instances maximum}
  - {name: Rich text string size, value: 1,048,576 characters}
  - {name: Concurrent EIB integrations, value: 5}
  - {name: Integration HTTP request processing time, value: 6 hours}
  - {name: Integration event maximum processing time, value: 7 days}
policies:
  - name: Back-off strategy
    description: >-
      Workday's own recommendation, verbatim in intent: implement an exponential back-off retry
      mechanism on the process that generates the API requests. No Retry-After value is supplied,
      so the back-off is entirely client-side guesswork.
  - name: Enforcement discretion
    description: >-
      "Workday may, in its sole discretion, (a) throttle your use of the integration or web service;
      or (b) suspend your access until usage is brought within the limit." Enforcement is contractual,
      not a published numeric ceiling.
maintainers:
  - FN: Kin Lane
    email: kin@apievangelist.com