QUOTA_EXCEEDED
GCP QUOTA_EXCEEDED commonly appears as an `ErrorInfo.reason` when a quota dimension is exhausted for the current request context.
Last reviewed: February 23, 2026|Editorial standard: source-backed technical guidance
What Does Quota Exceeded Mean?
Quota policy blocked the request, so throughput is constrained until consumption is reduced or available quota headroom is increased.
Common Causes
- -Project or service quota limit is reached for the current time window.
- -Short traffic spikes trigger rate-limited quota dimensions.
- -Background jobs consume shared quota unexpectedly.
- -Quota defaults are too low for current production load.
How to Fix Quota Exceeded
- 1Inspect the error details to identify quota metric, limit, and location.
- 2Reduce concurrency, smooth bursts, and apply jittered backoff.
- 3Move non-urgent jobs to lower-traffic windows.
- 4Request quota increases with measured usage evidence.
Step-by-Step Diagnosis for Quota Exceeded
- 1Parse ErrorInfo metadata to capture quota metric, limit name, and exhausted scope.
- 2Correlate failure window with request spikes, background workloads, and retry amplification.
- 3Verify billing/quota project mapping for user credential paths and service account calls.
- 4Retest with smoothed traffic plus updated quota controls to confirm headroom restoration.
Quota Signal and Scope Attribution
- -Extract machine-readable quota details from error payload (example: method-level read quota exhausted only in one region).
- -Validate request attribution context (example: wrong quota project receives all traffic due to shared ADC config).
Capacity Planning and Retry Behavior
- -Separate sustained demand growth from transient spikes (example: nightly batch overlaps peak interactive traffic).
- -Apply backoff and queue shaping before requesting increases (example: eliminating retry storm restores headroom without quota change).
How to Verify the Fix
- -Run representative load and confirm QUOTA_EXCEEDED no longer appears under normal traffic patterns.
- -Verify retry paths stay within configured budgets and do not re-trigger quota exhaustion.
- -Monitor quota utilization trends to confirm sustained operational headroom.
How to Prevent Recurrence
- -Set quota-utilization and consumption-rate alerts for critical APIs and projects.
- -Schedule high-volume background jobs outside peak interactive windows.
- -Continuously validate quota project attribution in multi-tenant or user-credential flows.
Pro Tip
- -reserve a fixed emergency quota buffer by throttling non-critical workloads when utilization crosses pre-defined thresholds.
Decision Support
Compare Guide
429 Too Many Requests vs 503 Service Unavailable
Use 429 for caller-specific throttling and 503 for service-wide outages, so retry behavior, escalation paths, and incident ownership stay correct.
Compare Guide
AWS ThrottlingException vs GCP RESOURCE_EXHAUSTED
Compare AWS ThrottlingException and GCP RESOURCE_EXHAUSTED to separate rate limiting from quota/resource exhaustion and choose the remediation path.
Playbook
Rate Limit Recovery Playbook (429 / ThrottlingException / RESOURCE_EXHAUSTED)
Use this playbook to separate transient throttling from hard quota exhaustion and apply retry, traffic-shaping, and quota-capacity fixes safely.
Official References
Provider Context
This guidance is specific to GCP services. Always validate implementation details against official provider documentation before deploying to production.