Announcement: Updated default retry behavior (2026)

[millems]

This issue tracks the 2026 retry updates for AWS CLI v2. See the announcement blog post for the full story across all AWS SDKs, including how to tell if you are affected.

Status

Opt-in	Coming in the following weeks. We will update this issue when the release ships.
Opt-in flag	AWS_NEW_RETRIES_2026=true
Default rollout	No sooner than November 2026

What changed

When you set AWS_NEW_RETRIES_2026=true, the default retry mode changes from legacy to standard. Several other retry defaults also update. The standard mode adds a retry quota that limits retries when failures are widespread, so your application fails fast instead of waiting on retries that are unlikely to succeed. This also helps outages resolve faster.

If you have explicitly configured a retry mode, max attempts, or backoff, your value takes precedence for that setting.

Setting	Before	After
Default retry mode	legacy	standard
Transient (non-throttling) base delay	1,000 ms	50 ms
Throttling base delay	1,000 ms	1,000 ms (unchanged)
Max attempts	5	3
Retry quota	None	500 tokens
Transient retry quota cost	None	14 tokens
DynamoDB and DynamoDB Streams