The Threads API for Newsrooms: Limits and Rules.

The short answer

The Threads API lets one profile publish 250 posts in any 24 hours, and a carousel counts as one of them. A carousel holds two to twenty images or videos. Since 22 December 2025, a post with more than five links fails.

Why the limits are a newsroom problem

A newsroom is the kind of account that finds the edges of the Threads API. A rolling news day, a live blog, a sports desk posting every goal: the volume that is unusual for a brand is ordinary for a publisher.

That is why the caps belong in the hands of whoever wires the scheduler, not in a help article someone reads after a post fails. For Publishers, the cost of getting them wrong is a missing post at the moment the story breaks.

If you are still deciding whether the platform earns a place in your plan at all, start with whether your brand should be on Threads. What follows assumes you have decided, and are now building the pipe.

How a post is published

Meta’s documentation describes publishing a single image, video or text post as a two-step process.

1. Create a media container by sending the post to the profile’s threads endpoint.
2. Publish that container by sending its ID to the threads_publish endpoint.

Meta recommends waiting on average 30 seconds between the two steps, to give its servers time to process the upload. A carousel adds a step in the middle: you create a container for each item, then a carousel container that holds them, then publish that.

The practical point is that a post is not live when your tool sends it. It is live when the second call succeeds. A scheduler that treats the first call as the finish line will report posts as sent that never appeared.

The daily cap: 250 posts

Meta’s rule is that profiles are limited to 250 published posts within a 24-hour period. Its documentation adds that publishing a carousel counts as a single post.

Two things follow for a newsroom.

• The limit is set per profile. In our reading, a group with several titles, each on its own profile, has an allowance for each.
• The window is 24 hours, which Meta’s example response expresses as 86,400 seconds. Plan as though it rolls rather than resetting at midnight.

At 250 a day, most brands will never meet the cap. A live news desk that posts every update as its own post, and sends replies on top, can.

A carousel can hold up to 20 images, videos, or a mix of the two, and it must have at least two. Meta’s changelog for 19 September 2024 records that carousel posts are now allowed up to 20 items. Because a carousel counts once against the cap, it is the efficient way to publish a gallery: twenty pictures from a match for the price of one post.

Checking the quota before you hit it

Meta provides an endpoint, threads_publishing_limit, that returns a profile’s current usage. It covers publishing, reply publishing, deleting and location search.

The example response in Meta’s troubleshooting guide shows these allowances, each over 24 hours:

• published posts: 250
• replies: 1,000
• deletes: 100
• location searches: 500

Those are the figures in Meta’s example, and the guide does not restate the reply, delete or search allowances in a sentence of its own. Treat the endpoint, not this list, as the source of truth for your profile.

In our view, the scheduler should call it before every burst and hold posts in a queue when the remaining allowance runs low, rather than discovering the cap from an error.

The five link rule

Since 22 December 2025, Threads posts with more than five links fail to post. Meta announced the change in its changelog on 8 December 2025.

The failure happens at the first step, when the media container is created, and returns the error THREADS_API__LINK_LIMIT_EXCEEDED. Meta’s advice is to reduce the number of unique links in the post to five or less.

What counts is the catch. Every unique URL in the text of the post counts as a link. A link attachment counts as an extra one only when its URL differs from every URL already in the text.

For a newsroom, the posts at risk are the round ups: a morning briefing that links six stories, or a live post that collects every update so far. Split those before they go, not after they bounce.

Text, topics and GIFs

Meta’s posts guide does not state a character limit for the text of a post. It does say that, for the post character limit, emojis are counted as the number of UTF-8 bytes. If your headlines carry emojis, test them at full length before a template goes live.

Topic tags must be between 1 and 50 characters long.

GIFs come with two limits. They work only on text-only posts, not on image, video or carousel posts, and GIPHY is currently the only GIF provider. Meta’s changelog said Tenor support would be sunset by 31 March 2026, so any tool still built on Tenor needs changing.

Media specifications

Images and video have their own rules.

Images:

• JPEG and PNG are the officially supported formats
• 8 MB at most
• between 320 and 1,440 pixels wide
• an aspect ratio no wider than 10:1
• the sRGB colour space

Video:

• MOV or MP4
• H264 or HEVC video, with AAC audio
• 23 to 60 frames a second
• five minutes long at most
• 1 GB at most

Meta recommends a 9:16 aspect ratio for video to avoid cropping or blank space. For a newsroom that cuts long video for social, the five minute ceiling is the one that bites.

Containers expire after 24 hours

A container that is not published within 24 hours expires. Meta’s troubleshooting guide lists the statuses a container can be in: in progress, finished, published, error and expired.

Meta recommends checking a container’s status once per minute, for no more than five minutes. That suits a newsroom that prepares posts ahead of an embargo. It does not suit a tool that builds containers the night before and publishes them the next evening.

What we would build into the scheduler

Our view is that every one of these limits should live in the tool, not in a person’s memory.

• Count links before the post leaves, using the same rule Meta uses: unique URLs in the text, plus an attachment only if it is new.
• Read the quota endpoint before a burst, and queue rather than fail.
• Wait for the container to finish before publishing, and treat a post as sent only when the publish call succeeds.
• Check media against the specifications on upload, so a reporter learns a video is too long before the moment it is needed.
• Publish galleries as carousels, so twenty images cost one post.

If your team needs help turning that into a working process, our publisher service is built for exactly this kind of operating detail.

How NBK thinks about publishing tools

The limits in an API are rarely the problem. The problem is a workflow that only learns them by failing in public.

A newsroom that writes the caps into its tools publishes on a busy day the same way it publishes on a quiet one. That is what running social as a system looks like at the level of a single endpoint.

Next step

Ask whoever owns your scheduler to show you where it handles each of the limits above. Any that it does not handle is a post that will one day fail during a story that matters.

If you publish to X as well, our guide to X Articles and how the API handles drafts covers the same ground for that platform.