How to Get More Than 100 Items with Get Items in Power Automate (and Past 5,000)

A few months ago, a sales manager asked me why their monthly report flow had “lost” most of the orders. The flow read a SharePoint list of 328 orders with Get items, added up the amounts and emailed a summary, and the total was far too low. There was no error in the run history. The flow had simply processed the first 100 items and stopped.

That’s the default behaviour of Get items, and it catches almost everyone at some point. The good news is that it only takes a setting or two to fix, as long as you know which setting fits the size of your list.

Quick answer: Get items returns 100 items by default. To get up to 5,000, set Top Count under Advanced parameters. To get more, turn on Pagination (Settings tab > Networking) and set a Threshold. With a Microsoft 365 license the threshold stops at 5,000 items; premium licenses allow up to 100,000. For bigger lists, get the items in batches of 5,000 by ID.

In this tutorial, I’ll show you each method using that same list of 328 orders, and then explain how to handle lists with more than 5,000 items, where the usual settings stop working.

Why Get items returns only 100 items

Microsoft’s Get items guidance is clear about it: the default item limit of the SharePoint Get items action is 100. That keeps flows fast when you only need a few items, but it means you have to ask for more explicitly whenever you need the whole list. There are two settings that do this, and one SharePoint limit that sits behind both of them:

Setting	What it does	Maximum
Top Count	Returns up to this many items in one request	5,000 (the SharePoint list view threshold). More fails.
Pagination + Threshold	Keeps requesting pages until it reaches the threshold	5,000 with a Microsoft 365 or other Low-profile license; 100,000 with premium licenses
List view threshold	SharePoint’s limit per query	5,000 items. It can’t be changed in SharePoint Online.

For the examples, I’m using a SharePoint list called Monthly Orders with 328 items and four columns: Order ID, Customer Name, Order Date and Order Amount.

Method 1: Set Top Count (up to 5,000 items)

If your list has fewer than 5,000 items, this is the quickest fix, and it’s the one I used for the sales report. Start with an instant cloud flow that uses the Manually trigger a flow trigger, so you can test it easily. Add the SharePoint Get items action and choose your Site Address and List Name.

Then open Advanced parameters, add Top Count, and enter the number of items you need. I usually enter a comfortable margin above the current size of the list, for example 1000 for a list of 328 items, but anything up to 5,000 works.

To check that it works, add a Compose action and select Order ID from the dynamic content. Because Get items returns a list, Power Automate automatically wraps the Compose in a For each loop. Save the flow and test it. In the run history, the loop now runs 328 times instead of 100:

One warning: don’t enter a number above 5,000. Top Count can’t go past SharePoint’s list view threshold, and a higher value makes the action fail rather than quietly returning 5,000 items.

Method 2: Turn on pagination

Pagination is the better choice when you don’t know how large the list will grow, or when you use a Filter Query on a big list (more on that below). Instead of asking for everything in one request, the action keeps requesting pages of items until it reaches the threshold you set.

To turn it on, select the Get items action and open the Settings tab in the action’s pane. Under Networking, switch Pagination on and enter the maximum number of items you want in Threshold, for example 5000.

Save and test the flow again. This time, the action returns all 328 items without any Top Count:

Before you set a large threshold, it helps to understand what your license allows. According to Microsoft’s Power Automate limits, paginated results stop at 5,000 items for the Low performance profile. That profile covers Microsoft 365 licenses, the free plan, Power Apps Plan 1 and per app, Power Automate Plan 1 and trials. Premium licenses allow up to 100,000 items.

There are a few other details worth knowing. Each page the action fetches counts as an action run, so very large thresholds use more of your daily request allowance. You may also get slightly more items than the threshold, because pagination always fetches whole pages. And Apply to each has the same ceiling as pagination: 5,000 items for Low-profile licenses and 100,000 for others.

If you still use the classic designer, the same setting is under the action’s … menu > Settings > Pagination.

Filter Query on lists with more than 5,000 items

Large lists have one behaviour that confuses a lot of people. If your list has more than 5,000 items and you use a Filter Query, Get items can return nothing at all when none of the first 5,000 items match, even though matching items exist further down the list. Microsoft’s recommended fix is to turn on Pagination for the action, so it keeps looking beyond the first page.

It also helps to index the columns you filter on. In SharePoint, open List settings > Indexed columns > Create a new index. A list can have up to 20 indexes, and it’s easiest to create them before the list grows past 5,000 items.

If you need help with the filter syntax itself, see Power Automate Get items filter query examples.

Method 3: Get all items from lists over 5,000 items (batching by ID)

With a Microsoft 365 license, neither Top Count nor pagination can go past 5,000 items. For bigger lists, I read the list in batches of 5,000, using the item ID to keep track of where each batch ends. It only needs standard actions, so it works without a premium license. Here’s how to build it:

1. Add an Initialize variable action that creates LastID as an Integer with the value 0.
2. Add a Do until loop.
3. Inside the loop, add Get items with the Filter Query ID gt @{variables('LastID')}, Order By set to ID asc, and Top Count set to 5000.
4. Still inside the loop, process this batch, for example with an Apply to each over the Get items output. Handling each batch inside the loop keeps every Apply to each under the 5,000-item limit.
5. Add a Condition that checks the batch isn’t empty, and in its True branch, Set variable LastID to last(outputs('Get_items')?['body/value'])?['ID'].
6. Set the Do until condition to stop when a batch returns fewer than 5,000 items: less(length(outputs('Get_items')?['body/value']), 5000).

Filtering on ID works on lists of any size, because ID is SharePoint’s own item key and is always indexed. By default, Do until runs up to 60 times (you can raise that to 5,000), so even the default setting covers lists of up to 300,000 items.

If you’re comfortable with APIs, another option is the Send an HTTP request to SharePoint action with the SharePoint REST API, which can also page through results. See how to get SharePoint list items using the REST API.

Other Get items limits to keep in mind

Even when you get the item count right, a couple of other limits can trip up a flow. Get items and Get files support a maximum of 12 lookup columns, and person, lookup and managed metadata columns all count towards that. If your list has more, use Limit Columns by View and pick a view with fewer columns.

The SharePoint connector also allows 600 calls per connection every 60 seconds, so a flow that loops through thousands of items and updates each one can be throttled. And for performance, it’s always better to fetch only what you need: a Filter Query and a Top Count are faster than getting every item and filtering them afterwards.

Which method should you use?

Here’s how I decide, based on the size of the list and the license the flow owner has:

Your list	Use
Up to 5,000 items	Top Count, or Pagination with a threshold of 5,000
More than 5,000 items, premium license	Pagination with a threshold up to 100,000
More than 5,000 items, Microsoft 365 license	Batching by ID (Method 3)
Large list with a Filter Query	Pagination on, and index the filtered column

These guides cover more of the Get items action:

• How to Get All SharePoint List Items in Power Automate?
• How to Use Power Automate Get Items Filter Query + 8 Examples
• Power Automate Get Items Filter Query Multiple Conditions
• Power Automate Get Items Filter Query Date [With Examples]
• Power Automate Get items Order By
• How to Loop Through SharePoint List Items in Power Automate [With Filter & Large List Support]

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