💡 Quota management is available on every OpinionX plan, even the free tier!
Quotas let you set a maximum number of participants for a specific group, so that once you've collected enough responses from that group, any further matching participants are routed out of the survey instead of continuing. This is useful whenever you need a balanced or capped sample — for example, "no more than 200 iOS users", "exactly 100 responses from each region", or simply "stop at 500 completed responses overall".
This guide explains what quotas do, how to set them up, what happens to over-quota participants, and how quotas interact with the rest of OpinionX.
What is a screening quota?
A quota is a rule that says 'once this many participants matching this condition have completed the survey, stop accepting more of them.'
Each quota has three parts:
Condition → who the quota applies to (eg. "Location is France"), built with the same builder interface as in our Branching Logic feature.
Target Number → how many participants you want from that group.
Overflow Destination → where participants go once the quota group is full.
Participants who match a quota that's already full are tagged as Over Quota and sent to the overflow destination, instead of being as a standard 'Completed' participant in your results, making it easier to filter them out of your results.
Where to find Screening Quotas
Quotas live on the Settings tab of your setup dashboard, in a section titled Screening Quotas:
This is deliberately separate from the survey builder itself, because quotas are set at a survey level rather than on any individual block, and so that you see every quota and its live fill status in one place while your survey runs instead of digging through individual questions.
How to set up a quota on your OpinionX survey (step by step)
Setting up a quota on your OpinionX survey is quick and easy:
Go to the Settings tab on your dashboard and find the Screening Quotas section.
Click the Add Quota button and give the quota a name (for your own reference only, participants never see this, for example "French Users" or "Survey Full").
Set your target number of participants in field between Once and Participants.
Choose what the quota applies to:
To cap the total number of completed responses across the whole survey, use the Finish option, no condition needed.
To cap a specific group, change the dropdown to "Matches the following criteria" and build your conditions below it using the new boxes that appear (choose a question, an operator, a value, etc).
Choose where overflow goes using the Send overflow to [...] dropdown, either the default over-quota page or use a custom Finish Page that you have already created over on the Survey Setup tab (this step is required if you have a redirect link you want to send over-quota participants to).
Make sure the quota is Enabled using the toggle in the top-right of the quota card. If your survey has zero participants, quotas will be enabled when created, but if your survey is already gathering responses then new quotas will be disabled when created to prevent you from unintentionally blocking new people.
In the end, your quota setup will read like a sentence: Once [100] participants [match the following criteria ...], send overflow to [the over-quota page].
As responses come in, each quota shows a live Quota Progress bar — eg. 45% Filled if 45 participants match the quota conditions out of a total target of 100 matching participants, so you can monitor quota fill at a glance.
Use the Duplicate button to copy a quota's setup into a new one, Delete to remove it, or Add Another Quota to create more from scratch.
Testing your quotas: Preview Mode does not enforce quotas — screening only happens on live responses. To test a quota, use your live participant link. A completed test response counts toward the quota's progress. You can remove test responses afterwards with Clear All Participant Data on the Results Overview or by deleting individual participants manually.
Enabling quotas (and why new ones are sometimes off by default)
To prevent you from accidentally capping a survey that's already collecting responses, new quotas follow a simple rule:
On a survey that has no participants yet, new quotas are enabled by default.
On a survey that is already running and has 1 or more participants, new quotas are disabled when created, so you can finish configuring them before they take effect.
Always double-check that your quota is enabled before you rely on it:
When does OpinionX check a quota?
A quota is checked as soon as OpinionX knows which group a participant belongs to, which is the moment they answer the question your quota condition depends on.
If that question is early in the survey, the participant is checked (and screened out if the group is already full) part-way through.
If the answer only comes near the end, the check happens then.
This means a participant who doesn't qualify for a full group is routed out as soon as possible, rather than completing the whole survey first.
How quota counts behave over time
Quota counts work like a running tally of admissions, not a live recalculation:
When a participant completes and counts toward a quota, that's recorded on them.
Changing a quota's conditions only affects participants from that point forward. Existing participants keep the quota membership they had when they completed. OpinionX does not retroactively re-sort past participants into or out of a quota after you change the rules later on.
Deleting a participant reduces the count of any quota they were counted toward. If that brings the quota back below its target, the quota re-opens and the next new matching participant can come through. However, OpinionX does not retrospectively pull a previously over-quota participant back in — freed space is filled only by new responses going forward.
What happens when a quota fills up
Quotas only count completed participants. Incompletes and screen-outs don't count towards quotas as neither actually complete the survey. Here's the behaviour to be aware of:
A participant who is admitted while there's still room will always be allowed to finish and will count as a Completed response, even if the group fills up while they're still answering. This means a quota can occasionally finish with slightly more than its target (for example, 201 instead of the limit of 200) if several people were mid-survey when it filled. This is intentional for participant experience management, so that you avoid rejecting someone after they've already completed your entire survey.
A participant who reaches the quota check when the group is already full is marked Over Quota and sent to the overflow destination.
If you need a strict hard cap with no overshoot, the reliable way to enforce it is at the recruitment source (for example, your panel's own participant limit), rather than inside the survey.
Seeing which quota a participant hit
While your survey runs, go to the Settings Tab and scroll to the Screening Quotas section. There you can each quota's progress bar, which shows how full it is, ie. the number of completed participants counted toward its target and the percentage of your target you've filled so far.
For participant-level detail, open the Participants Tab on your Results. A Quota column shows which quota each participant counted toward — or, for over-quota participants, which quota screened them out.
Customising the over-quota experience
By default, over-quota participants are sent to OpinionX's built-in default Over-quota page:
The default Over-Quota page auto-translates to match your survey's language, so there's nothing to set up for multi-language surveys, and it will adapt to match your survey's theme too.
If you'd like a custom message or a custom redirect (common when recruiting through an external panel that needs a specific over-quota return URL), create an additional Finish Page with your own content, then select it as the overflow destination on the quota configuration section of your Settings tab. A participant can only ever have one completion status, so despite the Finish Page having a "Participant Status" dropdown (Completed or Screen Out), the Over-Quota status will be automatically applied as priority when relevant.
How to exclude Over-Quota participants from your results
By default, OpinionX will show every participant on your results page. To exclude over-quota participants, click the Completes tile at the top of the Results Overview tab to hide all other participant types and your results dashboard will recalculate the page instantly for you. Alternatively, use the segmentation menu to configure a custom filter, where you'll see an option for Participant Status that includes Over Quota.
The difference between quotas vs. participant limits
A quota and your pricing plan's participant limit are two separate controls:
A participant limit is set by your pricing plan and governs how many participants load on your results page (25 on the free tier, unlimited on paid plans). Every stored participant counts toward a participant limit, regardless of participant status.
A quota is a research control you set, and it counts only completed participants in the group you defined. Quotas can be set regardless of which OpinionX pricing plan you are on. Even if your free tier survey hits the limit of 25 participants, your survey will continue collecting data and any quotas you have set up will continue working on participants 26 onwards.
Quotas and participant limits don't interact beyond the fact that a completed, in-quota participant both fills their quota and counts toward your plan's participant limit
The difference between quotas vs. screen-outs
Quotas and screen-outs both end a participant’s survey early and keep them out of your completed results, so they’re easy to confuse. Screen-outs are about fit (do they qualify to be part of this survey?), while quotas are about volume (do we have enough of those people yet?).
A screen-out removes someone because they don’t qualify — their answers don’t fit who you’re looking for. You set this up in Branching Logic and they’re recorded with the Screened Out status. A given answer always screens out the same way: if “I don’t own a car” disqualifies someone, it disqualifies everyone who picks it, every time, regardless of how many people hit that rule.
A quota removes someone because you already have enough of their group — they do qualify, you’ve just collected all the responses you need from people like them. You set this up in Screening Quotas section of your Settings tab, and they’re recorded with the Over Quota status. Whether someone is sent away depends on how full the quota is at that moment: the same answer might sail through early in your survey, then be over quota later once the group fills.
Frequently asked questions
Do partial or incomplete responses count toward a quota? No. Quotas count completed participants only. Someone who starts but doesn't finish never counts toward a quota.
Do screened-out participants count toward a quota? No. Only completed, qualifying participants fill a quota. Screened-out and over-quota participants never count as a Complete participant. More about this in our guide to Participant Statuses.
Can I set quotas on more than one group at once? Yes. You can add multiple quotas, and they're each counted independently. You can also build interlocking quotas (eg. young men, older men, young women, older women) by creating a separate quota with the relevant combined condition for each cell.
Can a quota exceed its target? Slightly, yes. See "What happens when a quota fills up" above. Participants already in progress when the group fills are allowed to finish, which is more likely to happen if (a) you have a long survey with quota checks early on, or (b) you distribute your survey to a lot of people all at once.
What happens if I delete a completed participant? The quota they belong to will recount it's total, and the progress bar will go down by one. If that reopens the quota, the next new matching participant matching that condition will be admitted rather than sent to the over-quota page.