How Many Buckets? Sharing Rule Limits and Steve's Number of Zeros

Module 4 of 6 in the chapter Public Groups and Criteria-Based Sharing Rules, chapter 7 of Securing Salesforce: Sharing and Visibility. Each module stands on its own.

The question this module answers: Sharing rules are limited per object. How do you know, before you build, whether rules are the right way at all?

In class I ask: how many criteria-based sharing rules can I have on an object? People guess: 10? 20? Somewhere in the tens? The answer is 50.

The limits

Salesforce’s limit today: “You can define up to 300 total sharing rules for each object, including up to 50 criteria-based or guest user sharing rules, if available for the object” (Sharing Rules (opens in a new tab), Salesforce Help, checked 2026-11-07).

Three things to notice in that sentence.

Per object. Each object has its own budget. Accounts have 300, cases have 300.
One budget of 50 for two kinds. Criteria-based and guest user rules share the 50 (module 3). You don’t get 50 and 50.
The 300 includes them. Owner-based rules use the rest.

And the budget is shared by everyone who builds on that object. If one project uses 40 criteria-based rules on accounts, the next team has 10 left. That’s what I mean by using up the resources: you’ve used them all and not left any for other things.

What about Guam?

Here’s the request I hear. “If the account is in Arizona, share it with the Arizona group. If it’s in Nevada, share it with the Nevada group.” And so on, one rule per state.

I’d say stop right there. Somebody will come along and say, what about Guam? Or what about this other sharing rule? And you’ll say, hey, I used them all up. Fifty states fill the 50 by themselves, and the 51st value has no rule to go to.

So anytime there’s a pattern of more than about 10, I’d say don’t do it with criteria-based rules. Watch around 10 or 15, because 10 can become 20 or 30.

Steve’s number of zeros

When people can’t tell me a number, I use something I call Steve’s number of zeros. I use it for integration volumes and data volumes, and it works just as well for sharing. Are we talking about 10 of these? 100? A thousand? A million? You go from clearly under to absurdly above, and eventually they can tell you how many zeros.

For sharing, the question is: how many will there be? How many separate buckets of records, each going to its own set of people?

A handful, up to about 20. Criteria-based rules can do it. Start watching at about 10, because 10 can become 20 or 30.
About 20 to 200. This is the best fit for owner-based sharing rules. It’s too many for the 50 criteria-based rules, and comfortably inside the 300. If the owners of the records fall into those buckets, one owner-based rule per bucket does it. Chapter 8 covers them.
200 to 300. Now you’re at the edge of owner-based sharing too. You’d use up the 300 and leave nothing for anyone else. Rules are the wrong way.
Thousands and up. Look past rules altogether.

Those are my own guidelines, not Salesforce’s limits. The limits are 50 and 300. My guidelines leave room for the next team and the next Guam.

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First, fewer buckets

Before you change the way, ask whether you really need that many buckets. The question isn’t how many people a rule reaches. You can widen a target as much as you like with a group. The question is how many separate decisions there are.

Collapse the values. If the states really go to five regional teams, the record needs a field that says the region, not a rule per state. Five values, five rules, and the field (module 2) is filled by an automation from the state. Guam gets a region when someone adds it to the automation, not a new rule.
Use groups inside groups. If several states go to the same people, they’re one bucket, and the target is one group with the states’ groups inside it (module 1). Look at the superpower of the group as a target.
Group by owner instead. If the records’ owners already fall into the right buckets, one per region or team, you could group it by owners, not by criteria. That’s the owner-based best fit above: tens to a couple of hundred buckets. Chapter 8 covers them.

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When the zeros outgrow rules

Some models really do have hundreds or thousands of buckets. Then rules are the wrong way, and the map in chapter 5 has others:

Territories. For accounts and what hangs off them, territories are buckets that scale: “Allocations for each territory model include up to 1,000 territories. But if you require more, Salesforce Customer Support can increase your allocations depending on your Salesforce edition,” up to 99,999 per model in some editions, with “Requests for more than 20,000 territories per model” needing approval (Allocations and Considerations for Territories (opens in a new tab), Salesforce Help, checked 2026-11-07). Chapter 9 covers them.
Programmatic sharing. When the decision is too specific for any rule, code or a flow writes the share rows itself. Chapter 11 covers when that’s justified.
Sharing sets. For thousands of external customers who each see their own account’s records, sharing sets do it without a rule per customer. Chapter 15 covers them.

What an architect decides here

For each object, how many rules it has today, of the 50 and the 300, and who keeps that count.
For each new sharing request, the number of zeros: how many separate buckets there will be, now and later.
Whether the buckets can be collapsed: a field that names the bucket, groups inside groups, or owners who already fall into the buckets.
Where the count says rules are the wrong way, which way replaces them: owner-based rules, territories, programmatic sharing or sharing sets.

Beyond the exam: what AI changes. Salesforce’s Help suggests Setup with Agentforce to manage sharing rules (Sharing Rules). Ask an agent to “share each account with its state’s team,” and it may build one rule per state, the exact pattern this module warns about. Ask the number of zeros before you accept what it builds, and check how many of the 50 are left when it’s done.

Explore

Sharing Rules (opens in a new tab), Salesforce Help (checked 2026-11-07)
Allocations and Considerations for Territories (opens in a new tab), Salesforce Help (checked 2026-11-07)
Cracking the Code: “Steve’s Number of Zeros” for Estimating Integration Volumes, SteveTechArc (checked 2026-11-07): the number of zeros, first written up for integrations