Disclosure: Datamagnet publishes this article. People Data Labs' endpoints, pricing, and limits described below come from PDL's public documentation, pricing trackers, and G2 listings, checked in September 2026.
People Data Labs API: Endpoints, Pricing and Limits (2026)
The People Data Labs (PDL) API sells access to a database of over 2.4 billion person records through a set of enrichment, search, and cleaner endpoints, billed per matched record. If you're evaluating it for a build, the real questions aren't "does it have data" - it's which endpoint fits your workflow, what a credit actually costs at your volume, and how stale a "refreshed" record can get between updates.
This guide breaks down every current PDL endpoint, the actual per-record pricing (not just the headline plan names), documented rate limits, and PDL's monthly data refresh cadence - so you can size a build before you write a line of integration code.
TL;DR
- In 2026, People Data Labs' own stats page (v35.2) lists 2,466,510,427 person records, but only 26.7% carry an email and 36.4% a phone number (People Data Labs, All Dataset Stats, retrieved 2026-09-26).
- PDL bills per matched record: Pro Person plans start around $0.28 per credit (350-2,500 credits/month) and Pro Company plans around $0.10 per credit, dropping with volume and annual commitment (Cleanlist, People Data Labs Pricing Guide, 2026-09-01).
- The free tier caps out at 100 records a month, and email/phone fields on that tier return as
true/falsebooleans instead of real values - you can't preview actual contact data without paying (People Data Labs, Person Fields, retrieved 2026-09-26).- PDL refreshes its full dataset once a month; endpoints like Person Enrichment and Company Enrichment allow up to 1,000 requests/minute on paid plans, but Search API rate limits aren't published (People Data Labs, Usage Limits, retrieved 2026-09-26).
- If you need a live LinkedIn snapshot instead of a monthly-refreshed database record, Datamagnet fetches person and company profiles at request time for 1 credit each - though unlike PDL, it doesn't return emails or phone numbers (Datamagnet Pricing, retrieved 2026-09-26).
What Endpoints Does the People Data Labs API Offer?
People Data Labs ships 14 distinct API endpoints as of September 2026, split across three families: enrichment (1:1 record matching), search (multi-record queries), and cleaner APIs (string standardization) (People Data Labs, Person Endpoints; Company Endpoints, retrieved 2026-09-26). Picking the wrong family is the most common integration mistake - Enrichment expects you to already have a strong identifier, while Search is built for open-ended queries.
| Endpoint | Family | Input | What it returns |
|---|---|---|---|
| Person Enrichment | Enrichment | LinkedIn URL, name + company, email, phone | Full person profile: work history, education, emails, phones, social profiles |
| Bulk Person Enrichment | Enrichment | Array of 1-100 person queries | Array of enriched profiles + per-record status |
| Person Search | Search | Elasticsearch or SQL query | All matching profiles, paginated |
| Person Identify | Enrichment | Loose identifiers (name, company, address) | Up to 20 ranked candidate profiles |
| Person Changelog | Enrichment | pdl_id or profile identifiers | Field-level change history (e.g., job changes) |
| Company Enrichment | Enrichment | Domain or LinkedIn company URL | Firmographics: headcount, industry, founding year, socials |
| Bulk Company Enrichment | Enrichment | Array of 1-100 company queries | Array of enriched company profiles + status |
| Company Search | Search | Elasticsearch or SQL query | Matching company records, paginated |
| IP Enrichment | Enrichment | IP address | Location and associated company, matched against ~2B IPs |
| Autocomplete | Search | Partial field value | Suggested values for Search queries |
| Company/Location/School Cleaner | Cleaner | Raw string | Standardized name, location, and match confidence |
| Job Title / Skill Enrichment | Enrichment | Raw title or skill string | Cleaned title/skill with seniority and taxonomy tags |
Every endpoint also has a Sandbox equivalent that runs against mock data and burns no credits, which is useful for wiring up integration code before you spend real budget (People Data Labs, Sandbox APIs, retrieved 2026-09-26). For a live comparison against a request-time LinkedIn lookup instead of a stored-database match, Datamagnet's People Profile endpoint and Company Profile endpoint cover the same person/company use cases from a different data model.
Citation capsule: People Data Labs runs 14 API endpoints across three families - enrichment for 1:1 matching, search for open-ended queries, and cleaner APIs for standardizing raw strings - each metered separately against its own credit pool, so a Person Search call and a Company Enrichment call never compete for the same monthly allowance.
<!-- [PERSONAL EXPERIENCE] -->When our team mapped PDL's endpoint list against our own API surface while building our comparison page, one gap stood out fast: PDL has nothing equivalent to a Sales Navigator search-URL endpoint or a post-engagement pull. Its search endpoints query PDL's own stored database, not a live LinkedIn search result.
What Data Do Person and Company Enrichment Return?
Person Enrichment returns a full profile schema including emails, work_email, mobile_phone, and phone_numbers as named fields - but only if you're on a paid plan (People Data Labs, Person Fields, retrieved 2026-09-26). On the free tier, those same fields come back as true or false booleans, telling you PDL has a match without revealing what it is.
That distinction matters if you're trying to evaluate match quality before committing budget. You can confirm PDL found a phone number for a given profile, but you can't see whether it's current or even the right format, until you upgrade. Company Enrichment is simpler - it returns firmographic fields only (headcount, industry, location, socials), with no personal contact data involved at all, so the free-tier obfuscation issue doesn't apply there.
Citation capsule: People Data Labs' free-tier API keys return real profile data for most fields but mask emails and phone_numbers to boolean true/false values instead of the actual contact detail, which means you can confirm a match exists without seeing what PDL actually found until you're on a paid plan.
How Much Does the People Data Labs API Cost?
People Data Labs prices by matched record, not by seat, and the per-record cost drops as your monthly volume climbs. Its Pro Person plan starts at roughly $0.28 per credit for 350-2,500 credits a month and falls to about $0.25 per credit between 5,001 and 8,333 credits, while Pro Company starts around $0.10 per credit for 1,000 records (Cleanlist, People Data Labs Pricing Guide, retrieved 2026-09-26).
| Plan | Volume | Price | Effective per-credit cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | Up to 100 records/mo | $0 | Contact fields obfuscated |
| Trial | 500 credits, 30 days | $0 | Unused credits roll into a paid plan if you upgrade during the trial |
| Pro Person - Tier 1 | 350-2,500 credits/mo | $98/mo (entry point) | ~$0.28 |
| Pro Person - Tier 2 | 2,501-5,000 credits/mo | Scales with volume | ~$0.265 |
| Pro Person - Tier 3 | 5,001-8,333 credits/mo | Scales with volume | ~$0.25 |
| Pro Person - Annual | 350 credits/mo equivalent | $940/yr | ~$0.224 (~20% off monthly) |
| Pro Company | 1,000 records/mo | $100/mo | ~$0.10 |
| Bulk Data License | Custom volume | Custom, sales-negotiated | Flat-file licensing, separate from API metering |
Isn't it worth asking what a "credit" actually buys you before comparing sticker prices? PDL's higher per-credit cost reflects that a matched record can include contact fields - email and mobile phone - that not every provider returns at all. Datamagnet, for comparison, charges 1 credit for a live LinkedIn person or company profile lookup on a Starter plan at $39/month for 1,000 credits (about $0.039/credit), a Pro plan at $99/month for 10,000 credits (about $0.0099/credit), and a Scale plan at $199/month for 25,000 credits (about $0.008/credit) - but it doesn't return emails or phone numbers under any plan (Datamagnet Pricing, retrieved 2026-09-26). That gap isn't fully apples-to-apples - you're paying PDL partly for the contact-detail fields Datamagnet's API doesn't attempt to provide at all, so the comparison holds for data-freshness use cases, not contact completeness.
<!-- [UNIQUE INSIGHT] -->Most pricing comparisons stop at "PDL charges $X per record." The number that actually matters is cost-per-usable record: at the entry Pro Person tier, roughly three-quarters of PDL's dataset has no phone number and PDL's price already reflects contact fields you may only get part of the time. Budget against expected fill rate, not the sticker price per credit.
Check your remaining balance anytime through Datamagnet's Credit Balance endpoint so a high-volume enrichment job doesn't run out mid-sync.
What Are People Data Labs' Rate Limits?
People Data Labs enforces per-endpoint rate limits on a fixed-window basis, and they vary significantly by endpoint and plan. Person Enrichment allows 100 requests/minute on self-serve plans and up to 1,000 requests/minute once you're on a paying plan, while Company Enrichment starts far lower at just 10 requests/minute on self-serve (People Data Labs, Usage Limits, retrieved 2026-09-26).
| Endpoint | Self-serve/free | Paying/enterprise |
|---|---|---|
| Person Enrichment | 100 req/min | 1,000 req/min |
| Company Enrichment | 10 req/min | 1,000 req/min |
| Job Title / Skill Enrichment | 100 req/min | 5,000 req/min |
| Person Changelog | 100 req/min | 500 req/min (up to 5,000 on request) |
| Bulk endpoints | 1-100 records per request | Same batch cap, higher call frequency |
Notably, PDL doesn't publish a specific numeric rate limit for Person Search or Company Search - only Enrichment and Changelog limits appear in its docs. An open thread on PDL's own feedback board asking to raise the Search API rate limit suggests it defaults lower than Enrichment, though the exact figure isn't public (People Data Labs, Feature Requests, retrieved 2026-09-26). Budget extra headroom, or a support conversation, if a Search-heavy workload is central to your build.
Citation capsule: People Data Labs caps Company Enrichment at just 10 requests a minute on self-serve plans - ten times tighter than Person Enrichment's 100 - which means a company-data-heavy integration will hit its ceiling far sooner than a person-lookup-heavy one, even on the same account tier.
How Often Does People Data Labs Refresh Its Data?
People Data Labs refreshes its entire dataset once a month, so every record you pull reflects, at best, a snapshot that's up to four weeks old. PDL states plainly that "every record you get back is the most up-to-date version we have in our dataset, refreshed each month" (People Data Labs, Company Data, retrieved 2026-09-26), and its current dataset version (v35.2) shows 933,179,824 job/experience records with a 37.8% fill rate (People Data Labs, All Dataset Stats, retrieved 2026-09-26).
A monthly cycle is fine for firmographic research that doesn't change week to week - headcount bands, industry classification, funding history. It's a weaker fit if your workflow depends on catching a job change or a title update the same week it happens, since PDL's own G2-listed reviews call out the refresh cadence as a source of stale records in fast-moving markets (G2, People Data Labs Products, retrieved 2026-09-26).
For that specific gap, Datamagnet's approach is structurally different rather than just faster: its People Profile and Company Profile endpoints fetch directly from LinkedIn at request time instead of querying a stored database, and its job-change signal monitors can flag a role change as it happens rather than waiting for a monthly batch. Neither approach is universally "better" - a monthly refresh across 2.4 billion records is a different engineering tradeoff than a live single-profile fetch, and the right one depends on whether you need breadth or freshness.
People Data Labs vs. Datamagnet: Which Fits Your Use Case?
People Data Labs and Datamagnet solve overlapping problems with opposite architectures: PDL queries a large, monthly-refreshed proprietary database, while Datamagnet fetches LinkedIn person and company profiles live at the moment you request them. Neither is a strict upgrade over the other - the right pick depends on whether your workflow needs database breadth (PDL) or point-in-time freshness plus LinkedIn-native search and engagement signals (Datamagnet).
| Capability | People Data Labs | Datamagnet |
|---|---|---|
| Data model | Stored database, refreshed monthly | Live fetch from LinkedIn at request time |
| Emails / phone numbers | Yes, on paid plans (fill rates 26.7% / 36.4%) | Not returned on any plan |
| Search | Elasticsearch/SQL query against PDL's own dataset | ICP People/Company Search, plus Sales Navigator search-URL input |
| Engagement/signal data | Person Changelog (field-change history) | LinkedIn post engagement data and real-time job-change signals |
| Entry pricing | ~$98/mo (Person), ~$100/mo (Company) | From $39/mo, 1 credit per live profile lookup |
| Free tier | 100 records/mo, contact fields obfuscated | 10 free credits |
If your build needs verified emails and phone numbers at database scale, PDL's fill rates - however partial - are something Datamagnet's API simply doesn't attempt to provide. If your build is closer to real-time account research, ICP-filtered prospecting, or catching a job change the week it happens, that's the gap Datamagnet is built to close. For a fuller side-by-side, including credit consumption per action, see our detailed breakdown of People Data Labs alternatives.
Is the People Data Labs API Worth It?
People Data Labs is worth it if you need email and phone coverage at database scale and can tolerate a monthly refresh cycle - its 2.4 billion-record dataset and per-record pricing model are hard to match for bulk contact appending. It's a weaker fit if your workflow depends on same-week freshness, LinkedIn-native search formats like Sales Navigator URLs, or engagement-based signals, none of which PDL's current endpoint lineup covers.
Budget carefully against fill rates, not just the advertised per-credit price - a chunk of what you pay for covers fields PDL doesn't guarantee it can fill. And if freshness matters more than raw contact-field coverage for your use case, it's worth testing a request-time API like Datamagnet's People API against a sample list before committing to either provider's paid tier.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the People Data Labs API free?
Partially. PDL's free tier allows up to 100 records a month, but email and phone fields return as true/false booleans instead of real values on that tier (People Data Labs, Person Fields, retrieved 2026-09-26). New signups also get a 30-day trial with 500 API credits that unlock full field values.
How much does People Data Labs cost per record?
Pro Person plans start around $0.28 per credit for 350-2,500 records a month, dropping to about $0.25 at higher volume tiers, while Pro Company starts near $0.10 per credit for 1,000 records (Cleanlist, People Data Labs Pricing Guide, retrieved 2026-09-26). Annual billing cuts the effective rate by roughly 20%.
Does the PDL API return emails and phone numbers?
Yes, on paid plans - emails, work_email, and mobile_phone are named fields in the Person Enrichment schema. Coverage is partial: PDL's own stats page shows a 26.7% fill rate for emails and 36.4% for phone numbers across its dataset (People Data Labs, All Dataset Stats, retrieved 2026-09-26).
How often is People Data Labs' data updated?
Monthly. PDL refreshes its full dataset once a month and states every record reflects "the most up-to-date version we have in our dataset" as of that cycle (People Data Labs, Company Data, retrieved 2026-09-26). Job and role data can lag up to four weeks behind a real-world change.
What's the difference between People Data Labs and Datamagnet?
PDL queries a stored, monthly-refreshed database and can return emails and phone numbers on paid plans. Datamagnet fetches LinkedIn person and company profiles live at request time for 1 credit each, plus ICP and Sales Navigator URL search and job-change signals - but it doesn't return emails or phone numbers on any plan. See the full People Data Labs alternatives comparison for a complete breakdown.
Sources
- People Data Labs, All Dataset Stats, retrieved 2026-09-26, https://docs.peopledatalabs.com/docs/stats
- People Data Labs, Person Fields, retrieved 2026-09-26, https://docs.peopledatalabs.com/docs/fields
- People Data Labs, Person Endpoints, retrieved 2026-09-26, https://docs.peopledatalabs.com/docs/person-endpoints
- People Data Labs, Company Endpoints, retrieved 2026-09-26, https://docs.peopledatalabs.com/docs/company-endpoints
- People Data Labs, Sandbox APIs Reference, retrieved 2026-09-26, https://docs.peopledatalabs.com/docs/sandbox-apis-reference
- People Data Labs, Usage Limits, retrieved 2026-09-26, https://docs.peopledatalabs.com/docs/usage-limits
- People Data Labs, Company Data, retrieved 2026-09-26, https://www.peopledatalabs.com/company-data
- People Data Labs, Feature Requests - Search API rate limit, retrieved 2026-09-26, https://feedback.peopledatalabs.com/feature-requests/p/increase-to-default-and-maximum-search-api-rate-limit
- Cleanlist, People Data Labs Pricing Guide, published 2026-09-01, retrieved 2026-09-26, https://www.cleanlist.ai/blog/2026-09-01-people-data-labs-pricing-guide
- G2, People Data Labs Products, retrieved 2026-09-26, https://www.g2.com/sellers/people-data-labs-c5a31d58-6904-403e-8c68-ee82af5b61e5
- Datamagnet, Pricing page (self-published), retrieved 2026-09-26, https://www.datamagnet.co/pricing/
- Datamagnet, People Profile endpoint, retrieved 2026-09-26, https://docs.datamagnet.co/api-reference/endpoints/people
- Datamagnet, Company Profile endpoint, retrieved 2026-09-26, https://docs.datamagnet.co/api-reference/endpoints/company
- Datamagnet, Credit Balance endpoint, retrieved 2026-09-26, https://docs.datamagnet.co/api-reference/endpoints/credits
