Every SharePoint limit, sourced and dated

Four limits shape most intranet builds. A list or library holds up to 30 million items, but any single view that returns more than 5,000 items will fail, and in SharePoint Online that 5,000 figure cannot be raised. A site collection allows 2,000 lists and libraries combined and up to 25 TB of storage. Navigation is capped at 500 child links per level. Beyond those hard limits, Microsoft publishes recommended ceilings for performance — notably 20 web parts per page and 5,000 pages per site.

It is the list view threshold, and it is widely misunderstood. It does not cap how many items a list can hold — that limit is 30 million. It caps how many items a single view can return in one query. Past 5,000 the view throws an error, because SQL Server would otherwise lock the whole table. In SharePoint Online the threshold is fixed and administrators cannot change it. Filtering views on indexed columns is the supported way to work with large lists.

A hard limit is enforced by the service: cross it and something breaks or is blocked outright, such as a view returning more than 5,000 items or a site exceeding 2,000 lists. A recommended limit is performance guidance: exceed it and the platform still works, it simply gets slower — 20 web parts per page and 5,000 pages per site are recommendations, not blocks. Published guidance often quotes both interchangeably, which is the source of a great deal of confusion.

Microsoft recommends no more than 20 web parts on a page in total, counting both built-in and custom ones, and no more than 4 dynamic web parts — those that query SharePoint for fresh data on load, such as News or Highlighted Content. These are performance recommendations rather than enforced limits: the page will still save and publish above them, it will simply load more slowly, most noticeably on mobile and slow connections.

The apps that most commonly supply content to a SharePoint intranet are Microsoft Lists for trackers and registers, Viva Engage for company-wide conversation, Planner for team tasks, Forms for data capture, Loop for portable live content, and Viva Connections to deliver the whole intranet inside Microsoft Teams. Each surfaces on a page through a built-in web part, and each has its own service limits worth knowing before you design around it.

No. The figures here are for SharePoint in Microsoft 365. Several behave differently on-premises — most importantly the list view threshold, which an administrator can raise or disable on SharePoint Server but cannot change in SharePoint Online, because the service runs as a shared tenant environment where one tenant’s query load affects others. Storage, site, and tenant-level limits also differ. Check the SharePoint Server documentation for your specific version.

Irregularly, and usually without an announcement. Microsoft revises service descriptions as the platform changes, and figures that circulate widely online are often several years out of date — the Loop workspace limit, for example, moved from 5 GB to a far larger ceiling in 2024 and much published guidance still quotes the old number. Every figure on this reference carries the date it was last verified, and pages are reviewed quarterly.