SharePoint Site Storage Limit – Updated Guide for 2025
Every SharePoint Online site has a 25 TB limit, and all sites share a combined tenant quota of 1 TB plus 10 GB per licensed user. In this article, I’ll let you know what the SharePoint site storage limit is, how to check it and ways to increase it effectively.
Without wasting time, let’s start:
- What is the SharePoint Site Storage Limit?
- Storage Management Modes – Automatic vs. Manual
- How to Check SharePoint Storage Limit?
- What Happens When the SharePoint Online Storage Quota Exceeded?
- How to Increase SharePoint Storage Limit for a Site?
- Best Practices to Manage SharePoint Site Storage Limit
- Author’s Verdict
- People Also Ask
What is the SharePoint Site Storage Limit?
Every Microsoft 365 organisation gets a default SharePoint Online storage pool. This is not the same as an individual site limit; it’s a total quota for your tenant.
Microsoft’s current rules as of 2025:
- Base Storage Allocation: Your tenant gets 1 TB of storage.
- Additional Per-User Storage: You also get 10 GB per licensed user.
- Purchase Additional Storage: You can buy more storage in 1 GB increments from the Microsoft 365 admin centre.
- Per-Site Cap: No individual SharePoint site can exceed 25 TB.
- Maximum Sites: Up to 2 million sites per tenant.
For example, if an organisation with 200 licensed users:
- Base storage: 1 TB
- Per-user storage: 200 × 10 GB = 2,000 GB
- Total storage pool: 1 TB + 2 TB = 3 TB
Storage Management Modes – Automatic vs. Manual
Microsoft now gives two ways to manage SharePoint site storage:
- Automatic (Default): All sites draw from the shared pool without any hard per-site limit, except the 25 TB maximum.
- Manual: You can set a quota for each site. When you switch to Manual, all site quotas are set to the maximum 25 TB.
How to Check SharePoint Site Storage Limit?
To manage tenant storage effectively, it is essential to know about the space you already use and how much is free. To do so, it is important to know how to check SharePoint storage limit via these steps:
- Log in with admin credentials.
- Choose Admin Centers > SharePoint.
- Now, the Active Sites page shows total and available storage.
- In Active Sites, review the Storage Used column. For more details, select the site > Settings > Storage.
What Happens When the SharePoint Online Storage Quota Exceeded?
In many cases, organisation SharePoint admins don’t check the tenant storage, and users continuously add more pages to the sites, which will fill the space quickly.
If your SharePoint Online storage quota exceeded, then these types of issues you have to face:
- Users can’t upload new files.
- New site creation fails.
- OneDrive syncs to SharePoint stop.
- Downgrade SharePoint performance
Before you hit the SharePoint site storage limit, Microsoft sends admin alerts to stop adding pages, sites, or other content. Instead, remove irrelevant data or backup SharePoint Online to local storage, then delete that data which not needed currently, but may be in future.
Those who need to keep all data, then, in that case, you have to increase its limit or upgrade to the new plan, which offers more storage. For the same, go through the next section.
How to Increase SharePoint Storage Limit for a Site?
Increasing the storage limit is so easy; you just need to follow these steps:
- Open SharePoint Admin Center.
- Select the site from Active Sites.
- Click Storage in the settings panel.
- Increase the SharePoint site storage limit up to 25 TB, if your pool allows.
If the pool doesn’t have enough capacity, you have to free up space by deleting unwanted data or purchasing more storage.
Alternatively, if you don’t want to upgrade to the more expensive M365 plan and delete the current data, you can perform a SharePoint Tenant to Tenant migration to increase storage without affecting your budget.
Are you interested? Unfortunately, there is no native solution provided by SharePoint to migrate data to another tenant. But, don’t worry, as a SharePoint admin, I have a solution to deal with this, i.e. SharePoint Online Migration Tool.
This solution comes with an easy-to-use interface and advanced filters. Additionally, it can migrate all your SharePoint data, including sites, subsites, document libraries, lists, permissions, and other content simultaneously.
So, this software is the answer to how to increase SharePoint storage limit without deleting or upgrading to the new M365 subscription.
Best Practices to Manage SharePoint Site Storage Limit
According to Microsoft’s official advice, these steps help prevent storage issues:
- Regularly empty the Recycle Bin.
- Delete unused files and sites
- Be cautious with retention policies.
- Move archives off SharePoint.
- Limit version history as SharePoint keep hundreds of versions of each file.
Author’s Verdict
Understanding the SharePoint site storage limit is crucial for smooth collaboration and app performance. With the new 25 TB per site limit and unlimited purchasable storage, Microsoft has made things much easier.
In this discussion, I covered all the crucial points related to how to increase SharePoint storage limit without upgrading the storage plan or deleting data. Additionally, I explained how to check and manage it effortlessly.
From now on, you have the answers to the SharePoint Online storage quota exceeded type of issue.
People Also Ask
Q1. What is the maximum SharePoint site storage limit in 2025?
As of now, each SharePoint Online site can have up to 25 TB of storage.Q2. How much total storage does my Microsoft 365 tenant get?
You get:
- 1 TB base storage for the tenant.
- +10 GB per licensed user.
Q3. Can I control storage limits for individual sites?
Yes. In the SharePoint Admin Center, switch from Automatic to Manual storage management. Then, set per-site quotas up to 25 TB.Q4. Why did my tenant’s available storage drop after removing users?
If you remove users, you lose the 10 GB per user allocation, and your pool can shrink.Q5. Does the Recycle Bin count toward my SharePoint storage limit?
Yes. Both the first-stage and second-stage Recycle Bins do count toward your tenant’s total storage.Q6. What happens when SharePoint storage is full?
If your storage pool runs out:
- Users can’t upload files.
- New site creation fails.
- OneDrive sync to SharePoint stops working.
Q7. Is the Microsoft storage calculation in GB or GiB?
Microsoft uses the binary measurement 1 GB = 2³⁰ bytes (1,073,741,824 bytes).Q8. Does version history affect the SharePoint site storage limit?
Yes, every document version is stored separately. If your library keeps 500 versions of a 10 MB file, that’s almost 5 GB for that file alone.