From 2 weeks to 2 minutes: Amazon Cognito launches Provisioned limits for self-service rate limit management

Imagine preparing for your biggest sales event of the year, and you want to ensure your customer identity management service can handle the elevated traffic for carrying out application activities. For security teams, business leaders, and technologists managing identity infrastructure at scale, this scenario has been all too familiar. Whether you’re a CISO evaluating security controls, a CFO managing cloud costs, traditional support ticket processes for adjusting Amazon Cognito rate limits meant waiting 10–14 days for capacity increases, requiring teams to plan weeks in advance or rush to escalate.

Today, we’re announcing provisioned limits for Amazon Cognito, a capability that transforms how you manage authentication rate limits. This introduces a feature in the AWS Management Console for Amazon Cognito for on-demand capacity adjustments, working alongside the existing account-level maximum limits in AWS Service Quotas. Together, they give you self-service control over your authentication infrastructure so you can scale up for Black Friday (or similar sales events), scale down after tax season, and optimize costs with unprecedented precision. What once took up to 2 weeks now happens in minutes.

In this post, you’ll learn how provisioned limits work, the relationship between account-level maximums and provisioned capacity, the cost implications and optimization strategies, and step-by-step implementation guidance. This capability fundamentally changes how you approach authentication capacity planning.

Identity management services open the front door to your application. When users can’t sign in, everything else stops. Amazon Cognito offers extremely flexible limit management: customers can request adjustments as granular as 1 request per second (RPS) for as short as 1 day. As customer demand for faster, self-service adjustments grew, we identified opportunities to address the following challenges:

• Support tickets required for each rate limit change
• 10–14 day approval timelines for standard review and processing
• Advance planning needed weeks ahead of anticipated traffic spikes

For businesses with seasonal traffic, like tax preparation services that see 90% of annual authentication volume in March and April, or ecommerce platforms preparing for Black Friday, these factors meant teams had to plan capacity decisions well in advance with limited ability to adjust in the moment.

Starting July 6, 2026, Amazon Cognito introduced provisioned limits in the Amazon Cognito console. At the account level (per AWS Region, per account), you’ll find a Provisioned limits tab next to the User Pools tab. This gives you direct control over your authentication rate limits through two complementary mechanisms:

• Provisioned limits (Amazon Cognito console) – Adjust your provisioned capacity up or down on-demand. Changes take effect immediately. You’re billed for the capacity you provision above the default limit, regardless of how much you use.
• Account-level max limit (Service Quotas console) – Set your account’s ceiling, the maximum RPS your account is allowed to provision. Raising this ceiling doesn’t incur additional charges. Approximately 90% of requests are automatically approved within minutes. For larger limit increases (depending on the API category and Region), manual approval through AWS Support might still be required.

The following experience shows the end-to-end workflow of adjusting your provisioned limits and requesting a higher account-level max.

Let’s use the UserCreation API as an example. The default limit is 50 RPS, and initially the provisioned limit is also 50 RPS—meaning billed capacity is 0 (no additional charge). The applied account-level max limit is also 50 RPS. So you have three values: default (50), provisioned limit (50), and account-level max (50).

1. Start by going to the Amazon Cognito console and choosing User pools from the navigation pane.
   

   Figure 2: UserCreation with default values

2. Choose Edit provisioned limit, to go to the Edit provisioned limit page with an input field for New provisioned limit. However, because the account-level max limit is 50 RPS, you can’t set the provisioned limit above 50. For example, if you want to provision 55 RPS, the console won’t allow it because 55 exceeds the current account max of 50.
   

   Figure 3: Editing the provisioned limit constraint constraint to more than the account-level max

3. To set a higher limit, choose Request an increase. This takes you to the Service Quotas console, where you can choose Request increase at account level to request a higher account-level max, for example, 55 RPS. Most requests are automatically approved within minutes. At any time, you can check the status of the request using the Request history tab.
   

   Figure 4: Service Quotas page where the account-level max increase is requested and auto-approved

4. After receiving approval, return to the Amazon Cognito console to edit your provisioned limit up to 55 RPS. Your billed capacity becomes 5 RPS (55 minus the 50 default).
   

   Figure 5: Provisioned after increasing the provisioned limit to 55 RPS, with billed capacity of 5 RPS.

This two-part model gives you precise control over both cost and capacity. Raising the account-level max in Service Quotas doesn’t incur additional charges—it only sets your ceiling. You are billed for what you provision in the Amazon Cognito console above the default, so you benefit from right-sizing your provisioned capacity to match expected demand. Raise your account max ahead of time to prepare for future scaling needs without incurring any cost. When the time comes, increase your provisioned limit to what you need, and scale back down after the event. You stop being charged for the extra capacity as soon as you reduce the provisioned limit. This applies equally to seasonal spikes, planned load tests, or unexpected viral growth—all self-service, all within minutes.

The provisioned limits experience introduces three key concepts that work together:

Key Takeaways

• Amazon Cognito now offers self-service rate limit management via provisioned limits.
• Capacity adjustments that previously took up to two weeks now happen in minutes.
• This enables precise cost optimization for events like Black Friday.