Polling is the most generous tier on purpose. There are no webhooks, so polling is the only way you learn a job finished, and a completion signal you are charged to use is not much of a signal.
When you hit one
You get429 with a Retry-After header in seconds. Honor it rather than picking your own interval; it is computed from your actual window, so backing off by less just burns another request.
Concurrency is separate
Some launches also refuse with429 concurrency-limit-reached, which is not the same thing as being rate limited. It means too many of your jobs are already running, so the fix is to wait for one to finish rather than to slow your request rate. Slowing down does not help; finishing does.
The cap is per capability, not one shared pool, and it is sized by what that work costs us:
Comparisons and reviews, drafts, template runs and workflow runs count across your whole organization. Matrix runs count against the installation the credential belongs to.
The
Retry-After on a 202 and on a 200 read of an unfinished operation is guidance about the job, not about your budget. Only the one on a 429 is a limit.
