The three Power Automate action limits of 6,000, 40,000, and 250,000 per day explained: which license brings which limit.
If you work with multiple licenses in Power Automate, sooner or later you will run into the numbers 6,000, 40,000, and 250,000. They show up as a warning when a flow is throttled, or they appear in a licensing table without it being immediately clear which limit applies to your own flow. The three values are not arbitrary thresholds, but rather the daily action limits of the three core Power Automate license tiers: Standard, Premium, and Process.
This article maps the three limits to the matching license types, explains what determines which limit counts for a specific flow, and shows what happens if a limit is exceeded. It is based on the official Power Platform documentation on request limits and Microsoft's Power Automate licensing FAQ.
Before the three thresholds make sense, it is worth looking at the unit behind them. Power Automate counts, according to the Microsoft documentation on request limits, every API request to connectors, every HTTP action, and every built-in action, from a simple Initialize Variable to a Compose action. The following applies:
A simple flow with one trigger and one action already uses two actions per run. For flows with loops or frequent runs, consumption grows accordingly fast.
All three limits apply per 24 hours and run as a rolling window. So the system looks back at the last 24 hours on every run, not at the calendar day.
The lowest limit applies to all license contexts without Premium entitlement. According to the Power Automate licensing FAQ, the following fall under it:
For simple personal automations, this is usually enough. As soon as several flows run regularly or loops process larger amounts of data, the limit is reached quickly.
Anyone with a Power Automate Premium or a Power Apps Premium license gets the mid-tier limit of 40,000 actions per day. This also includes Dynamics 365 Enterprise and Dynamics 365 Professional, as well as the older Power Automate per-user plan. Important: this limit applies per user across all cloud flows in the tenant, not per individual flow. Two Premium users in the same tenant therefore each have their own 40,000 actions, which do not affect one another.
The highest standard limit belongs to the Process license, the successor to the older per-flow plans. Unlike the two previous limits, it is not tied to a user but to a specific cloud flow: if a Process license is assigned to a flow, this limit applies to the flow itself as well as to its child and related flows, regardless of who runs them.
If 250,000 actions are not enough for a single, very data-intensive flow, according to the FAQ you can add more:
The three limits do not add up. Every flow runs in exactly one license context, and that context determines the limit:
If a person holds both a Dynamics 365 and a Premium license, the two 40,000 limits do not, according to Microsoft, add up to 80,000. Each flow context gets its own limit, independent of the person's other licenses.
If a limit is exceeded, Power Automate does not block the flow immediately. Occasional, small overages have little effect but increasingly delay subsequent actions the larger the overage becomes. If a flow stays over the limit continuously for 14 days, Power Automate disables it and notifies the owner. As countermeasures, Microsoft recommends reducing the number of actions in the flow design, assigning a Process license for permanently high demand, or switching the environment to pay-as-you-go billing, so that overages are simply billed extra instead of throttled. That way you keep control of your flows, even if a process grows more than planned.
Yes. Both successful and failed actions count toward the daily limit, as do retries and additional requests caused by pagination. Only skipped actions are not counted.
No, not automatically. Action limits apply per license context, not per person overall. For example, if someone has both a Dynamics 365 and a Premium license, each flow context gets its own 40,000 limit; the values do not add up to 80,000. An exception is multiple Process licenses on the same flow, which can be stacked deliberately.
In addition to the daily limit, there is a short-term limit of 100,000 Power Platform requests within five minutes, regardless of license. A flow with a Process license can therefore run up to 250,000 actions in a day, but no more than 100,000 of them within a single five-minute window.
Open the flow detail page and switch to the Analytics or Actions tab. There you can see the actual daily action consumption. In addition, the Power Platform admin center offers downloadable reports on Power Platform request usage, which can help identify individual flows or users with high consumption.
Not necessarily. Before a higher license becomes necessary, it is worth optimizing first: fewer loop iterations through filter parameters in the data query, less frequent run intervals for scheduled flows, or caching reused values in a variable. If consumption then stays permanently above 40,000 actions per day for a single business-critical flow, the Process license with its stackable 250,000 limit is the right solution.
Founder of NordFlux. Spent four years automating processes at enterprise scale at Dräger, and now brings that depth to the mid-market — pragmatic and with full data sovereignty.
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Which action limit applies to a flow depends on the license and connector involved, and hitting it triggers throttling right when the process matters most. NordFlux maps your critical flows to the correct limits and plans the matching license tier ahead of time.
