Is Notion saying “Rate limit reached, please try again later.”?

In cases of large content, this message is typically seen by developers, but can also be seen by frontend users.

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Notion FAQ explains this:

“This error means that you’ve hit our duplication rate limit — right now you can only duplicate 20,000 blocks per hour. Our apologies for the inconvenience!

If you wait a bit, you’ll be able to duplicate the content then 👍”

So, you can only duplicate 20,000 blocks per hour.

If you are trying to duplicate a big database with more than 20,000 blocks at once, you run into this issue – no matter how much you wait.

Some workarounds:

  • Try exporting the database as CSV and importing it
  • Try splitting up the database duplication process than doing the whole database at once. You can do this by adding filters to logically separate the database into parts and duplicate one part at a time.
  • You may want to wait for a new hourly window for the block duplication limit to reset.
  • Avoid having mega-databases (that may need to be duplicated in the future) unless absolutely necessary. For example, rather than using Notion for writing 100 blog posts per month, use Google Docs and keep Notion only for blog outlines.
  • Rather than duplicating the entire database, ask yourself if moving database items suffices?

I hope you found some workarounds for the rate limit reached error in Notion.