What are Instagram’s API rate limits?

• Business use case (BUC)

  Formula

  4,800 × number of impressions, per rolling 24 hours

  Applies to

  Most Instagram Graph API calls for a professional account. Impressions are how often the account’s content was seen in the last 24 hours.

• Platform rate limit

  Formula

  200 × number of users, per rolling hour

  Applies to

  Hashtag search and business discovery. Users are the app’s unique daily active users.

Because both limits scale with activity, a small or new account gets a much lower ceiling than a large one. That is why the same code can work for one account and be throttled for another.

• 01

  Hashtag search

  30 unique hashtags per Instagram account in any 7-day period.

• 02

  Publishing

  50 posts per account in 24 hours through the API.

• 03

  Messaging

  Separate per-second limits on the messaging APIs.

• 04

  Basic Display API

  Switched off on 4 December 2024. Apps must use the Instagram API with Instagram Login or Facebook Login instead.

Meta reports usage as percentages rather than a count of remaining calls.

X-Business-Use-Case-Usage: {"<account-id>": [{
  "type": "instagram",
  "call_count": 72,
  "total_cputime": 18,
  "total_time": 25,
  "estimated_time_to_regain_access": 0
}]}

When any value reaches 100, calls are throttled. estimated_time_to_regain_access gives the wait in minutes. The app-level limit is reported in X-App-Usage with the same percentage fields.

The fix is the same for all of them: stop calling, wait for usage to fall, and spread calls out.

The Instagram Graph API works with professional accounts your users connect. It can look up other business accounts in limited ways, but it cannot read arbitrary public profiles, their followers or the comments on someone else’s reels. Teams that need that public data use a data API instead.