What API rate limits exist for Dwolla’s Sandbox and Production environments?

Jul 22, 2025
Knowledge

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Title
What API rate limits exist for Dwolla’s Sandbox and Production environments?

Summary
A rate limit is used to control the rate of API requests an application can make within a given timeframe. If a limit is exceeded on an API, an error may be returned and an application may be throttled.

Dwolla imposes the following rate limits:

Volume-based rate limit for each endpoint in Dwolla API. These thresholds are defined outside of the range of what is considered normal API usage. If the rate limit is reached for an endpoint, subsequent requests to that particular endpoint will result in an HTTP status code 429 (Too Many Requests). This rate limit persists for 5 minutes. If you expect to be making a higher than normal volume of calls to any endpoint, please check the recommendation below.
Concurrency-based rate limit for transfers that, when created, are sourced from a Dwolla Balance associated with a single customer record or the main Dwolla account. Applications that attempt to create transfers sourced from the same balance funding source in quick succession may receive an HTTP 429 (Too Many Requests) status code instead.

Recommendation: All applications are bound by section 3.2 of the Dwolla Developer Terms of Service which states that applications are prohibited from performing abusive activity. To help maintain a reliable API for all consumers, applications should limit their activity such that it avoids sudden bursts of volume.

If you think that a recent change implemented in your application or an upcoming event might result in a high rate of API activity, please contact support@dwolla.com.

For applications that may initiate a large burst of balance sourced transfers, it’s recommended to build a retry mechanism to handle the 429 status code. The retry mechanism should follow an exponential backoff schedule to reduce request volume and utilize an idempotency key to ensure a single transfer request is performed only once and no duplicates are created.

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