Xero March 2026 changes: guide for third-party developers

What Changed in March 2026: The End of the Free API

Until December 2025, Xero's API was free with minimal restrictions. Developers could use it without paying Xero directly, billing their customers outside the Xero App Store.

Since March 2, 2026, everything changed. Xero introduced a tiered pricing system based on two main criteria: the number of Xero organizations connected (your customers) and the amount of data downloaded from Xero APIs each month.

This marks the end of the era when you could freely access all Xero data without limits.

How the New Pricing System Works

The model works in tiers. The more customers you have connected and the more data you download, the higher you climb and the more you pay:

• Starter : free, up to 5 customers, unlimited data
• Core : approximately €20/month, up to 50 customers, 10 GB of data
• Plus : approximately €140/month, up to 1,000 customers, 50 GB of data
• Advanced : approximately €820/month, up to 10,000 customers, 250 GB of data
• Enterprise : custom, unlimited customers and data

If you exceed your data quota, you pay approximately €1.40 per additional GB.

Features Locked Behind the Advanced Plan

This is where it becomes critical for developers: certain essential features are only available with the Advanced plan.

Features reserved for the Advanced plan :

• Journals : Access to complete double-entry accounting data, essential for advanced bank reconciliation tools, accounting audit software, or deep financial analysis platforms
• Xero Practice Manager (XPM) : The API dedicated to accounting firms managing multiple clients
• Bulk Connections : The ability to connect multiple Xero organizations in a single OAuth authentication flow, essential for B2B tools serving companies with multiple entities

Direct consequence : If your product requires access to accounting journals (like an advanced bank reconciliation tool, audit software, or financial analysis platform), you must subscribe to the Advanced plan, regardless of your customer count.

Call Limits That Impact Your Product

Xero imposes strict limits on the number of API calls possible:

• For small accounts (Starter plan) : 1,000 calls per day per customer organization
• For other plans : 5,000 calls per day per customer organization
• In real-time : 60 calls per minute per organization, maximum 5 simultaneous calls

These limits apply per customer organization. If you have 50 customers, you can make up to 250,000 calls per day total (50 × 5,000), but only 5,000 calls per day for each individual customer.

Why this matters for your product: If your application does frequent polling (regular automatic checks) instead of using webhooks, you can quickly hit these limits. A tool that checks account balances every 5 minutes for 100 customers will quickly exceed 5,000 calls/day/customer.

Bank Feeds with Xero: What You Need to Know

Automated bank feeds are essential for any fintech product working with accounting. Without them, your users must:

1. Manually export their bank statements as CSV
2. Upload them to Xero
3. Manually match transactions

This represents hours of manual work, frequent errors, and a poor user experience.

With automated bank feeds, transactions appear automatically in Xero and reconciliation takes 30 seconds.

Important information : Bank feeds are possible with Xero, but this requires having the necessary certifications and signing a specific contract with Xero. This partnership is open to financial institutions and developers who meet the certification criteria.

Use Cases Where the Consumption Plan Is Mandatory

Here are situations where your developer must upgrade to a paid plan, sometimes requiring Advanced:

Critical point : Even if you only have 10 customers, if your product needs Journals for bank reconciliation, you must take Advanced at €820/month. Customer count doesn't matter in this case; the functionality dictates the plan.

Strategies to Control Costs

Several approaches help you limit the bill:

Use webhooks instead of polling : Instead of checking every 5 minutes if new data is available, get notified by Xero when something changes. This reduces call volume by more than 90%.

Batch your requests : Xero accepts up to 50 items per call. If you need to create 350 invoices, make 7 batch calls instead of 350 individual calls.

Filter data aggressively : Request only the fields you need using %%where%% and %%summaryOnly=true%% parameters. This can reduce your data consumption by 50 to 80%.

Cache stable data locally : The chart of accounts, tax rates, customer contacts rarely change. Store them locally for several hours instead of fetching them every time.

Clean regularly : Disconnect inactive customer organizations consuming your quota without delivering value.

A Bottom-Trend in the Ecosystem

Xero's shift to a consumption-based model is just the beginning. We're observing this trend across several vendors:

• QuickBooks is currently testing a similar model on certain advanced endpoints
• Sage has introduced billing tiers based on volume
• Exact Online is evaluating an API credit system for its partners

Xero's consumption-based billing model is a signal that the ecosystem is maturing. Integrations are no longer just a "nice to have" feature but a major strategic, technical, and economic challenge. In this context, outsourcing the technical complexity of these integrations to a partner like Chift becomes even more relevant.

Ready to Activate Your Xero Connector?

You have all the information to make the right decision. Whether you're at the prototype stage, growing with a few customers, or targeting advanced features requiring Advanced, Chift supports you in deploying quickly and confidently.

Our team is available to discuss your integration in more depth :

• Evaluate your specific use case
• Help you choose the right Xero plan
• Guide you through activating the connector
• Answer your questions about bank feeds, certifications, or costs

Book a meeting with our team to discuss your Xero integration and find the best solution for your product.