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Sincerely requesting advice! How many rows can a list in SharePoint hold?
How many lists can be stored in SharePoint and how many rows of data can be stored in each list?
I've found some information about this in the documentation, but I'm not quite sure if it's correct, so I'm asking for advice, thanks!
A list can have up to 30 million items and a library can have up to 30 million files and folders. When a list, library, or folder contains more than 100,000 items, you can't break permissions inheritance on the list, library, or folder. You also can't re-inherit permissions on it. However, you can still break inheritance on the individual items within that list, library, or folder, up to the maximum number of unique permissions in the list or library (see the next section). To learn more about other restrictions for viewing large lists, see Manage large lists and libraries in Office 365.
Lists and libraries
2,000 lists and libraries combined per site collection (including main site and any subsites).
- 5000 items is the view limit, any more and you start getting issues with filtering(filter doesn't show all items), slow down, problems with querying. Reason for this is that it becomes to much for the back-end to manage in the view.
The more item you have the larger the issue becomes, at 100K you lose the ability to have custom permissions etc.
If you don't care about any of these issues you can have 30 million items...
Also having that much item won't be managable...
- If you plan to go over 5k, make sure to add column indexes in list settings for the fields you want to sort and filter on, and set a filter on the default view to keep the default view below 5k. I have seen people use lists for over 100k over a period of a couple years, but I would personally recommend Dataverse or something if you are going for that size - it's more robust.
People sometimes set up Power Automate flows to move list items to an "archive" after a certain age as a way of keeping the list smaller if you don't need to work with the older content as often.- Thanks for the advice. Very useful for my users to know.
- That is correct but It's not recommended to have over 5000 items. You start having some weird behaviour in filtering and sorting and just managing the list.
- Thanks for your reply.
I got your point, but 5,000 items and 100,000 items are way too much of a difference, isn't it? Why is that?- That was true back in the days (5,000 items) but that's not the case anymore. Personally, I'm working with lists of 500,000 items without any problems. If everything ( Site setting, list setting, search settings, etc.) is set up correctly, no problems. Myths die hard.....
