Table of Contents

Salesforce Governor Limits (Apex)

Governor limits are the runtime limits Salesforce enforces on Apex code so that no single tenant monopolises the shared, multi-tenant platform. Because many customers (orgs) run on the same infrastructure, Salesforce caps how many SOQL queries, DML statements, CPU seconds, callouts, and how much heap a single transaction can consume. Exceed a limit and the transaction is rolled back with a System.LimitException that you cannot catch and recover from — so designing within these limits is a core Salesforce architecture skill.

Per-Transaction Apex Limits

These limits count for each Apex transaction. For Batch Apex, these limits are reset for each execution of a batch of records in the execute method.

Description	Synchronous Limit	Asynchronous Limit
Total number of SOQL queries issued	100	200
Total number of records retrieved by SOQL queries	50k	50k
Total number of records retrieved by Database.getQueryLocator	10k	10k
Total number of SOSL queries issued	20	20
Total number of records retrieved by a single SOSL query	2k	2k
Total number of DML statements issued	150	150
Total number of records processed as a result of DML statements	10k	10k
Total stack depth for any Apex invocation that recursively fires triggers due to insert, update, or delete statements	16	16
Total number of callouts (HTTP requests or web services calls) in a transaction	100	100
Maximum cumulative timeout for all callouts (HTTP requests or Web services calls) in a transaction	120 seconds	120 seconds
Maximum number of methods with the future annotation allowed per Apex invocation	50	0 in batch and future contexts; 50 in queueable context
Maximum number of Apex jobs added to the queue with System.enqueueJob	50	1
Total number of sendEmail methods allowed	10	10
Total heap size	6 MB	12 MB
Maximum CPU time on the Salesforce servers	10 seconds	60 seconds
Maximum execution time for each Apex transaction	10 minutes	10 minutes
Maximum number of push notification method calls allowed per Apex transaction	10	10
Maximum number of push notifications that can be sent in each push notification method call	2k	2k
Maximum number of EventBus.publish calls for platform events configured to publish immediately	150	150

How to avoid hitting governor limits

The most common cause of a governor limit error is running SOQL or DML inside a loop. The standard remedies:

• Bulkify your code — process collections of records, never one record at a time. Move queries and DML outside for loops.
• Query selectively — retrieve only the fields and rows you need; respect the 50,000-record SOQL limit and use selective WHERE clauses backed by indexes.
• Use collections & maps — gather records into List/Map and perform a single DML per object type.
• Defer heavy work to asynchronous Apex — Batch, Queueable, and @future run with higher limits (e.g. 200 SOQL queries and 12 MB heap instead of 100 and 6 MB).
• Watch CPU time — the 10-second synchronous CPU limit is hit by complex logic, not I/O; simplify loops and avoid redundant processing.

Asynchronous (Batch, Queueable, @future, Scheduled) Apex generally gets the higher limits shown in the right-hand column above; synchronous triggers and Visualforce/Lightning controllers get the stricter left-hand column.