Error messages

You’ve hit your limit for Claude messages.

You’ve hit your limit for Claude messages.

This is the Claude app's rate-limit message, the one you get on claude.ai or in the desktop app when you've used up your allowance:

You’ve hit your limit for Claude messages. Limits will reset at 9:30 AM. View your usage details.

The time is filled in for you. When the reset is more than a day off, the app adds the date too (so a weekly limit reads as a day and a time). When it has no reset time to show, the second sentence becomes Wait before trying again. In July the app said Please wait before trying again. there instead. We read these strings in the claude.ai web code on September 25, 2026. Under the hood it's the app's answer to an HTTP 429 (the standard "too many requests" status). Elsewhere in the code a limit event in a reply stream carries the bare label Rate limited, which is the other wording people search for.

What limit you've hit

Limits run in windows (rolling periods of use). Anthropic's troubleshooting article describes a five-hour session with a warning first (Approaching 5-hour limit.) and then a block that says when it lifts, and the app also tracks a weekly allowance. The usage-limits article says claude.ai, Claude Code and the desktop app all draw on the same limit, so a long Claude Code session can use up your chat allowance too.

That article says you can wait for the reset or pay your way past it with an upgrade or usage credits. With credits turned on, the app keeps going and tells you so (5-hour limit resets [time] - continuing with usage credits.). The link in the message opens Settings, Usage. It shows each window and when it resets.

Messages that look similar but mean something else

The same function in the app code picks between this and a few neighbors, and they don't share a fix.

Too many responses are running at once. is about concurrency, meaning several replies generating at the same moment in your account. Stop one, or let it finish, and send again. Your allowance isn't involved.

You’ve reached your weekly limit for thinking messages. Try again next week. is its own weekly cap on extended-thinking messages, counted apart from the main one.

And if you've just upgraded, you may see Your new plan’s usage limits are still updating. Try again in a few minutes. The code only shows it within about five minutes of the change going through (after that you get the ordinary limit message again if you're still over).

When usage says you have plenty left

Two GitHub reports describe the message appearing when it shouldn't. On July 6, 2026 a Max subscriber on the Windows desktop app got it after a couple of short messages while Settings, Usage showed the session at 0% and the week at 6%. The status page listed claude.ai incidents that day, and the reporter's reading was that server errors were being shown as a limit. Then, on July 22, another Max user kept getting it after the stated reset time had passed. Nobody from Anthropic answered either one (a bot closed both, one as a duplicate).

So if the usage page disagrees with the message, look at status.claude.com first, then wait a few minutes and reload. What surprised us in the July 6 report was how flatly the two screens disagreed. The message on its own won't tell you whether it's your quota or an outage.

If you're seeing the Claude Code version of this, see “You've hit your session limit” in Claude Code.