USPS API rate limit capped at 60 requests per hour: How to prepare and why many are choosing Smarty

Title image that shows USPS's new 60-per-hour rate throttling as if it's a hose that's blocked off

Published December 3, 2025

The implications of USPS API limits

The throughput throttling is dramatic. At 1 address lookup per minute (60 per hour), an address-validation workflow that previously handled 6000 queries per minute can now only support one, creating immediate bottlenecks in any real-time or high/medium-volume system. Even many small-sized business operations may feel the squeeze from such a catastrophic throttling.

USPS states that developers may request higher limits, but the agency doesn’t document what increased thresholds are available, what criteria approvals require, or how quickly—or even whether—requests will be granted. So far, requests for commentary on the shift from USPS have gone unanswered, both by Smarty and by frustrated USPS users flocking to Smarty for a solution.

The USPS’s official documentation confirms the 60-per-hour default, but is silent on guaranteed higher tiers. See USPS’s official FAQ about the new platform.

Text image that says: For teams accustomed to the old Web Tools model, this is a catastrophic reduction.

Web Tools was historically treated as “functionally unlimited,” especially by businesses using it quietly behind the scenes for bulk data processing, address-cleanup pipelines, or continuous operational verification.

These organizations have not been conditioned to monitor throughput or prepare for throttling. Many don’t even realize they’re about to be rate-limited at all, or that critical systems that depend upon Web Tools will begin to fail altogether.

This is why companies who relied on the default limit of 6000 queries per minute are only now discovering bottlenecks—and why more are reaching out to Smarty in search of alternatives. Users of the new USPS platform have already reported that their address-validation traffic is hitting unseen limits.

This is a drastic shift from historical usage

USPS Web Tools has supported hundreds of thousands of organizations for years. Most teams built processes assuming USPS validation would “just work.” Nightly data refresh jobs, high-volume CRM, and lead ingestion workflows often depended on the USPS Address Validation API simply because it was free, mostly reliable enough, and widely available.

The new 60-calls-per-hour limit—essentially one validation request per minute—makes many of these workflows impossible. That’s 6,000 times slower than the default USPS used to provide. With this production decrease, even small and mid-sized businesses can exceed this minute threshold with only minuscule customer activity.

USPS’s new documentation reiterates the prohibition of bulk or automated list-based validation, emphasizing that the new platform is optimized for per-transaction validation rather than high-volume processing. For anything other than casual use—but more especially for mission-critical, enterprise workloads—this effectively eliminates USPS as a viable single-source address verification solution.

Sadly, these new limits disrupt real-world applications

CRM, SaaS, and enterprise systems

Modern business systems depend on accurate addresses for onboarding, identity verification, risk assessment, vendor management, account creation, support workflows, and third-party lead ingestion. When throughput drops, these systems slow down or break entirely.

For companies that ingest outside data (think purchased leads, partner datasets, or regulatory records), USPS’s new limits block timely imports. Systems that once validated thousands of rows per night will now take weeks or months to complete—if they complete at all. This undercuts sales operations, cross-selling, customer analytics, and onboarding.

Shipping and logistics workflows

Body image showing how the new USPS rate limit will slow shipping and logistics for everyone

Your shipping operations need to be fast, consistent, and predictable. When you hit your address verification rate limit, even a slight slowdown creates big problems throughout the entire fulfillment process. Suddenly you start seeing:

Slowed or stopped label generation
Halted routing, because orders can’t move forward until the address is validated
Failed or significantly delayed nightly batch-cleaning jobs
Frustrated customers due to delayed packages and extra follow-up steps for verification
Wasted team time and higher operational costs as staff wait out rate limits or try to work around delays
Leadership questioning why your fulfillment performance is slipping

If your team feels pressure to keep orders moving while the address-verification step is blocked, they might start:

Pushing orders through without validating the address
Guessing or filling in missing address details
Manually entering whatever information they have just to print a label
Skipping quality checks to avoid holding up the line
Using cached or outdated address data to keep orders flowing

If shortcuts are taken, you’ll start to have even bigger problems from:

Returned mail
Mislabeled or incorrect packages
Delivery delays that frustrate customers
Carrier correction fees and avoidable shipping costs
Extra manual cleanup and rework for your team
A drop in fulfillment accuracy and reliability

These problems do not come from the outage itself. They come from the shortcuts your team feels forced to take when things slow down. With that in mind, there is one important exception worth calling out.

If your business prints fewer than 60 labels per hour, the new USPS Address Validation structure may still work just fine. It’s free, simple, and can support you without any issues.

But once you begin scaling above that, you’ll experience operational bottlenecks if you’re still using it.

9 reasons why companies are switching from USPS to Smarty

1. Speed

At 25,000 per second, Smarty is 1.5 million times faster than the 60 address lookups per minute from USPS:

Text image that says:Math check! 25,000 x 60 sec/min = 1,500,000 per minute (And, this is just our standard speed. We can go much, much faster!) 1 per minute for the USPS = 1 1.5 million times faster!

But we aren’t just faster than the USPS. Smarty has quickly become the preferred alternative to USPS because it offers the reliability, throughput, coverage, and metadata modern organizations require.

2. USPS limiting rates and use cases for validation—Smarty essentially doesn’t

USPS’s SLA for the new rate-limited API prohibits the use of address validation for any purpose other than sending mail or shipping. Smarty offers a much more generous use case allowance.

3. Unlimited or extremely high-volume throughput

Smarty allows high-scale, high-speed address validation without restrictive hourly caps. Our address validation tools are designed for real-time verification in both single-address and high-volume batch operations, capable of processing millions or even billions of records quickly and reliably.

4. Higher accuracy and broader coverage

USPS only validates addresses to which it delivers mail. It doesn’t maintain a complete national database of all valid U.S. addresses. Millions of legitimate addresses—new construction, rural properties, non-postal residences, private roads—don’t appear in USPS datasets.

Smarty includes them.

With more than 20 million non-postal addresses and an architecture designed for completeness, Smarty’s match rates ALWAYS exceed those of the USPS. This leads directly to fewer shipping errors, lower support costs, and more reliable business analytics.

5. More frequently updated and enriched data

Smarty aggregates and updates property data from multiple authoritative sources so that you can take full confidence in knowing your nationwide addresses are up to date and fully enriched. With over 350 potential metadata points returned on every address from US Property Data, addresses are fresher and more complete than USPS’s inconsistently scheduled updates and underwhelmingly data-limited addresses.

6. Rooftop geocoding and advanced metadata

USPS provides no rooftop coordinates and limited metadata.

Smarty, on the other hand, recognizes the power that your business has when supplied with latitude/longitude, DPV, RDI, ZIP+4, carrier route, georeferencing, property insights, and more. An enriched address with up to 55 points of additional metadata means that you can more easily prevent fraud, take more calculated risks, geospatially analyze your datasets, and more, all while validating your address lists.

This additional data powers analytics, routing, risk modeling, and compliance workflows in any industry, serving businesses and organizations of all sizes.

7. Low latency and high reliability

Smarty offers consistently fast global response times and national response times, with standard US plans starting at 25,000 addresses per second (and we can go much, much faster if needed). Built on a highly redundant, cloud-agnostic infrastructure, small to medium-sized businesses can enjoy enterprise-grade reliability and uptime, while enterprise-level businesses can exceed this standard if needed.

Our US response time SLA guarantees a response time of ≤ 500 milliseconds.

Our global response time SLA guarantees a response time of ≤ 1000 milliseconds.

A historical uptime of over 99.999%, and demonstrated ability to side-step outages like AT&T, CrowdStrike, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Conduent, Asana, Atlassian’s Jira, and more make Smarty the no-brainer solution for organizations looking for consistency and reliability in their workflow partnerships and address validation automations.

8. Fast, accessible, human support

Even those relying on USPS as a data source regularly report difficulty getting USPS support responses.

From our own experience trying to contact them, we can confirm that it was a frustrating and fruitless ordeal. Even when we received a response from them after questioning whether the rate limits could be increased, they sent an email containing a number of links that didn’t address the question at all, providing no information or expectations/agreement to raise the rate limit.

Smarty offers responsive human support with fast turnaround times for chat, email, phone, and professional services support lines. Teams can get help with onboarding, integration, and architectural design from an unscripted human being who’s knowledgeable, fluent in code, and positioned near any team you might need to ask a question from.

9. Strong ROI from switching

Many companies working with Smarty will tell you they’ve experienced immediate perks from switching to Smarty:

Higher address match rates
Reduced failures and fewer undeliverable shipments
Faster ecommerce checkouts
More efficient internal data workflows
Improved customer service and reduced returns
Cleaner databases with less manual cleanup
Clear documentation for integration
Simple integration, with SDKs supporting 15+ programming languages, often up and running in hours or days instead of months. Sign up for a free trial to see for yourself.
Responsive support teams and customer service
Fair pricing with clear pricing models, avoiding hidden fees and charges
Kicks and giggles from a team that takes their job seriously but still knows how to have fun

Infographic summing up the 9 reasons that companies switch from USPS to Smarty

How to switch providers before the USPS API rate limit goes into effect

Because you're now required to write some additional code to integrate with the new USPS tools, now is the perfect time to switch to Smarty in 3 easy steps.

1. Audit your existing integration

Identify USPS dependencies
Review your API call volumes
Assess whether peak traffic already exceeds 60/hour (it likely does)
Ensure that your use case is allowed by the USPS license (Smarty allows for almost any use case, whereas USPS only allows address verification if printing mailing or shipping labels).

2. Identify which workflows will fail under the new limits, paying special attention to

Checkout flows
Nightly data pipelines
Bulk validation routines (Something USPS doesn’t permit)
Internal (your teams) and external (your customers/clients) calls to the API

3. Build a transition plan with Smarty

Map current processes
Start a free trial for US Address Verification or International Address Verification
Use straightforward REST, SDKs, or CLI tools, or feel free to write your own code
Get hands-on guidance from our responsive, human support

Feel free to check the ROI you’ll almost instantly achieve from investing in super-sonic levels of speed and near microscopic levels of pinpoint accuracy after only a few months. You don’t have to take our word for it, either.

Here’s a list of satisfied customers who will tell you it’s time to make the leap, too:

Here’s a recommended migration timeline to avoid USPS rate limits in 2026

Infographic showing a recommended timline for migrating from USPS to Smarty before January 25, 2026

Conclusion

USPS’s 2026 API changes represent a dramatic shift that limits throughput, reliability, and flexibility.

Organizations that rely on USPS for address validation now face new operational risk, slower workflows, and data bottlenecks, as well as data inaccuracy and bad business decisions and analytics, should they choose to skip address validation once the USPS rate limit has been reached.

Smarty offers unlimited throughput, higher accuracy, fresher data, enriched data points surrounding an address, non-USPS coverage, rooftop geocoding, low latency, high uptime, and fast human support.

For teams already feeling the squeeze of USPS’s new limits, Smarty provides a far more capable and future-proof solution that you can build on with confidence.

Subscribe to our blog!

Learn more about RSS feeds here.