# Rate Limits

Explains the roughly 120-calls-per-minute-per-integration-key limit on the Events API and workarounds for 429 responses.

> This page describes the rate limits for the PagerDuty Events API. The rate limits for the
> PagerDuty REST API are described [here](/developer/rest-api-rate-limits).

**What are the limits?**

The PagerDuty Events API uses rate limits to provide a consistent experience for all of our customers. The Events v2 API has a limit of approximately 120 calls/minute per integration key. The limit is calculated over a 60 second window looking back from the current time. Account level limits are also applied to ensure reasonable use.

**The difference between an API call limit and an API rate limit**

A **call limit** is the number of times you can invoke an API within a certain time period. It is often a limit imposed purely by a SaaS vendor's business choice (pricing/packaging) rather than for technical reasons of capacity or fairness.

A **rate limit** is one imposed by a vendor for reasons of fairness, so that one customer doesn't overwhelm the vendor's infrastructure with events or deny service to other customers.

**What happens when a customer reaches the Events API rate limit?**

The response to the API call will say `429 - Request Limit Exceeded` and PagerDuty will not ingest the event.

**What are possible workarounds to the Events API Rate Limit?**

- *Retrying requests* - Simply retrying the request a moment later can help alleviate rate limiting. We suggest retrying 3 times with each request being 30 seconds apart.
- *Integrations* / *Service* - The rate limit applies per integration key. An easy solution is to increase the number of integration keys used on a service (fan out).
- *Services* - Another solution involves splitting a service into two or more. This includes the added benefit of being more specific with service definitions.
- In rare cases, engineering can raise the rate limit for Enterprise customers. This is rarely done, but please reach out to your account manager for more details.