Microsoft 365/SharePoint Online limits

The most important consideration when creating a SharePoint information architecture is the built-in limits of the Microsoft 365 platform. If you hit a hard scalability limit, processes grind to a halt - so it’s important to get it right first time around.

In this post, I’ll detail the various important service limits within the platform.

Limits within a tenant:

  • Site Collection: 500000 (half a million - total of Teams, Team/Comm/M365Group sites, and Private Channels - these all create a Site Collection)
  • Teams: 500000 - also contributes toward site collections limit

Within each Team:

  • Owners: 100 owners, 25k members-
  • Channels: 1000, 30 private channels

For each user:

  • Maxmimum teams a user can be a member of: 1000
  • Teams created: 100

Within each site collection:

  • Subsites: 2000 (do not use - no longer supported!)
  • Lists: 2000 lists/libraries

Within each list:

  • Items: 30 million (includes folders)
  • Items w/unique permissions: 50k - recommended to avoid due to degrading performance. Steady perf decrease after 10k.
  • Columns: depends on column types. Limited to 8k bytes
  • Views: 50 (shown in list dropdown)

Note: The maximum items in a list is often misunderstood - note that it is 30 million, and the commonly referenced maximum of 5000 items is per view only.

Within each view

  • Items: 5000 (view breaks if the filters return >5k items)
  • Lookups: 12 lookup columns (lookup, people, managed metadata)

Check out the offical Microsoft documentation here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/servicedescriptions/sharepoint-online-service-description/sharepoint-online-limits

There are a bunch of limits relating specifically to OneDrive: https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/restrictions-and-limitations-in-onedrive-and-sharepoint-64883a5d-228e-48f5-b3d2-eb39e07630fa

Microsoft 365 storage limits: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/manage-site-collection-storage-limits

Our products

Our products support a different information architecture depending on each customer use case. We’ll set up a modern work environment to automatically provision relevant workspaces whether those be sites, libraries, Teams or folders - but it all depends on your needs. Get in touch if you’d like to talk to us.