Limit of 5000 unique permissions per site collection

Question

SharePoint online and a document library.

There is a 5000 limit on unique permissions per site (is it per site or per site collection?). I might end up in a situation where every file has got unique permissions and despite keeping single libraries within 5000 items or less, there might be multiple libraries with the same features.

Anybody knows what happens exactly after the limit is surpassed? What are the performance degradation that you can experience? I found no examples from real life experience on this.

Answer 1

In SharePoint online, unique permission 5000 limit is not per site or site collection, it is per list or library

Microsoft recommends to have 5000 unique permissions but it can be increased to 50,000 - we should not increase the limit until we actually need it. For large lists, design to have as few unique permissions as possible. we need to design such a way so that we can keep unique permission below 5000.

Statement from Microsoft for unique permissions in list or libray level:

" Unique security scopes per list or library - The supported limit is 50,000, but the recommended general limit is 5,000. Above 5,000, access control list (ACL) size starts to matter. Although you can add scopes up to the supported limit of 50,000, Microsoft doesn’t recommend it unless you have a very specific scenario in mind. For large lists, design to have as few unique permissions as possible."

Please refer the below document for the limits in SharePoint online:

SharePoint Online limits

How to increase the limit to 50000?

From your office 365 help desk support, raise a ticket to Microsoft referring the above Microsoft document, they will guide you how to do that... their customer support is very good, within a few minutes after raising the ticket you will get a call from them.