sharepoint online limits and boundaries

SharePoint Online Limits & Boundaries: Explained

By John GarciaDecember 23, 2025

SharePoint Online, part of the Microsoft 365 suite, offers an array of features and benefits, making it a popular choice for businesses to create, manage, and share information. However, it's crucial to be aware of its limits and boundaries to ensure efficient and effective usage. Let's delve into the key constraints that can impact your SharePoint Online experience.

SharePoint Online's limits and boundaries can be categorized into several areas, including storage, lists and libraries, site collections, and item size. Understanding these boundaries can help you plan and optimize your SharePoint Online environment.

Storage and List/Library Limits

SharePoint Online's storage is primarily associated with its site collections and libraries. Each site collection comes with a base quota of 1 TB, with the ability to request more if needed. Within this quota, libraries have their own limits.

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Each library can contain up to 30 million files, with a maximum size of 250 GB per file. However, the list view threshold is 5,000 items, meaning that SharePoint might perform poorly with more than this number of items in a list or library.

Site Collection Limits

Site collections, which are the top-level containers for content in SharePoint, are subject to a range of limits. Each site collection can contain up to 250,000 sub-sites and 30 million documents. However, there's a recommended limit of 50,000 sub-sites per site collection due to performance considerations.

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A site collection's maximum size is 1 TB, but you can request more if needed. Understanding these limits can help you effectively manage and grow your SharePoint Online environment.

Item Size and Versioning

While SharePoint Online allows for significant storage, it's important to note the item size and versioning limits. The maximum size for a file in SharePoint Online is 250 GB. For versioning, when you enable version history, SharePoint keeps up to 500,000 major versions and 250,000 minor versions of an item.

Understanding these limits can help you plan your file management strategy in SharePoint Online, ensuring you stay within the boundaries and maintain efficient performance.

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SharePoint Online Limits for Users and Groups

SharePoint Online also has limits related to users and groups. For instance, a user can be a member of up to 256 groups, with a maximum of 500 unique permissions entries per list or library.

In terms of users, while SharePoint Online allows for an unlimited number of users, it's important to note that the list view threshold of 5,000 items can affect usability if not managed properly.

Term Store Limits

The term store, which manages your organization's controlled vocabulary, has its own set of limits. It can contain up to 50,000 groups, with each group allowing up to 2,000 terms. Each term can have up to 250 localizations.

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Understanding these term store limits can help you effectively manage your taxonomies in SharePoint Online.

In conclusion, while SharePoint Online provides generous limits and boundaries, it's essential to understand these constraints to ensure optimal performance, effective management, and efficient growth of your SharePoint Online environment. By staying within these boundaries, you can maximize the benefits of this powerful collaboration and document management platform.