Quick-reference tables for the limits, quotas, and thresholds that matter most to SharePoint Online administrators, migration consultants, and MSPs. Limits are for SharePoint Online (Microsoft 365) unless noted otherwise. Always verify current values against Microsoft's official documentation, as they can change with service updates.
Storage Quotas
Tenant storage is pooled across all sites. Microsoft calculates your base allocation from your license count.
| Limit | Value | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Base tenant storage | 1 TB + 10 GB per licensed user | Pooled across all sites. Additional storage can be purchased. |
| Default per-site storage quota | 25,600 MB (25 GB) | Admins can raise this to the full tenant pool in SharePoint admin center. |
| OneDrive storage per user (Microsoft 365 Business/E1) | 1 TB | Each user's OneDrive is a separate site collection drawn from the tenant pool. |
| OneDrive storage per user (Microsoft 365 E3/E5) | 5 TB (expandable to 25 TB on request) | Global admins can request further expansion beyond 25 TB for individual users via Microsoft support. |
| Storage consumed by Recycling Bin | Counts against site quota | Deleted items in the bin consume quota until permanently purged after 93 days. |
| Storage consumed by versions | Counts against site quota | Every major and minor version stores a full copy. Unmanaged versioning is a leading cause of quota overruns. |
File and Item Limits
These limits apply at the file, folder, and list-item level.
| Limit | Value | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Maximum file size | 250 GB | Files larger than 250 GB cannot be uploaded to SharePoint Online or OneDrive. |
| Maximum file name length | 400 characters | Includes the file extension. Shorter names are recommended for sync compatibility. |
| Characters not allowed in file/folder names | " * : < > ? / \ | | Also avoid leading or trailing spaces, and names ending with a period. |
| Maximum URL path length | 400 characters (SharePoint); 260 characters (OneDrive sync) | Deep folder nesting frequently causes sync failures on Windows clients due to the 260-character path limit. |
| Items per list or library | 30 million | Hard ceiling. Lists approaching this limit require careful column indexing for acceptable performance. |
| List view threshold | 5,000 items | Queries returning more than 5,000 items from a non-indexed column are blocked. Add an index to the filtered column to bypass the threshold. |
| Columns per list or library | 8,000 total; ~350 indexed | Includes site columns inherited from content types. Each additional column adds metadata storage overhead. |
| Content types per list | No documented hard limit | Practical limit before performance degrades is several hundred. Use content type hubs for cross-site reuse. |
Recycling Bin Limits
SharePoint Online uses a two-stage bin. Understanding both stages is essential when setting admin recovery expectations.
| Limit | Value | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Combined retention period | 93 days | Total time across first-stage and second-stage bins. The clock starts at deletion, not at promotion to second stage. |
| First-stage bin (user-visible) | Portion of 93 days | Visible to all site members. Items can be restored or permanently deleted by the user. |
| Second-stage bin (admin-only) | Remainder of 93-day window | Visible to site collection administrators only. Fills when users empty the first-stage bin. |
| Recycling Bin size limit | 200 levels or site quota | The bin will not hold more than 200 percent of the site's storage quota. Overflow items are purged earliest-first. |
| After 93 days | Items permanently purged | No native recovery path exists beyond 93 days. Options are limited to Microsoft 365 Backup (if licensed), a site rewind (up to 30 days for the whole site), or a third-party backup product. |
Versioning Limits
SharePoint Online does not impose a hard cap on version counts, but each version consumes site quota storage.
| Limit | Value | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Maximum major versions (library default) | 500 (configurable) | Library settings allow any value from 1 to 50,000. Increasing the limit without trimming old versions accumulates storage rapidly. |
| Maximum minor (draft) versions | Configurable up to 511 | Minor versions are kept per major version. Only relevant when minor versioning is enabled. |
| Versions visible in the UI | ~500 per page in version history | All versions are stored; the UI paginates beyond 500 entries. |
| Storage impact per version | Full file copy for binary files; delta for Office files | Office documents (docx, xlsx) stored in SharePoint use delta compression between versions. PDFs, images, and other binaries store full copies. |
Sharing and Permissions Limits
| Limit | Value | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Unique permissions per site collection | 50,000 | Each item or folder with broken inheritance counts as a unique permission. Exceeding this degrades performance significantly. |
| SharePoint groups per site collection | 10,000 | Standard practice is to use a small number of named groups rather than per-item groups. |
| Members per Microsoft 365 group | No hard limit; practical limit around 25,000 | Larger groups can have performance implications in Teams and SharePoint news feeds. |
| Shared links per item | No documented hard limit | Each sharing operation creates a new link if link reuse is disabled. High link counts can complicate permission audits. |
| External sharing invitations | Controlled by tenant policy | Tenant admins can restrict external sharing per site, per domain allowlist, or tenant-wide. |
Site and Tenant Structure Limits
| Limit | Value | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Site collections per tenant | 2 million (including OneDrive) | Each user's OneDrive is a separate site collection within this count. |
| Subsites per site collection | 2,000 per parent site (recommended) | Microsoft discourages deep subsite hierarchies. Hub sites are the recommended structure for cross-site navigation. |
| Hub sites per tenant | 2,000 | Sites can be associated with one hub at a time. |
| Document libraries per site | No hard limit; 2,000 recommended | Large numbers of libraries affect page load time in Site contents. |
| Files per folder (sync performance) | Recommended maximum: 300,000 | OneDrive sync client performance degrades above this threshold. Libraries can hold more items, but sync becomes unreliable. |
How these limits affect migrations
Migration projects routinely encounter two limits: file path length and unique permissions. A source environment with deep folder structures often has paths exceeding 260 characters that will fail to sync on any Windows PC after migration, even if SharePoint accepts the upload. Unique permissions exceeding 50,000 per site will degrade performance for everyone on that site collection.
ShareMaster's Explore Master surfaces hidden properties and content-type details that flag structural problems before migration starts. The Shared Links and Permissions tool identifies items with unique permissions so you can consolidate them before crossing the threshold.
For full cross-tenant migrations, Clone Master copies sites, libraries, files, and permissions while respecting the destination tenant's quotas. Running a Space Master version trim on the source before migrating reduces the amount of data transferred and avoids carrying years of version bloat into the destination.