eth_estimateGas enforces the EIP-7825 transaction gas cap: 'gas required exceeds allowance (16777216)' while eth_call is exempt

Ethereum documentation for the Fusaka upgrade notes that EIP-7825's per-transaction gas cap (2^24 = 16,777,216) does not affect eth_call, leaving open whether eth_estimateGas behaves the same way. It does not — estimation enforces the cap.

Observed on Infura: submitting an estimation request for a call that genuinely consumes more than 16.78M gas returns

"error": { "code": -32000, "message": "gas required exceeds allowance (16777216)" }

where the number in parentheses is exactly 2^24, i.e. the EIP-7825 limit rather than the block gas limit or a provider-specific ceiling.

Why this matters in practice: eth_call will happily simulate a 20M-gas call and return data, so a pipeline that simulates with eth_call and only later estimates gas will pass the first step and fail the second, with an error whose wording ("allowance") reads like an account-balance or provider-quota problem rather than a protocol cap. Do not paper over it by passing a large explicit gas field — such a transaction is invalid at the protocol level and will not be included.

The right response is to split the work into multiple transactions under the cap. If you specifically need an estimate for something above the cap (for analysis, or for a chain with a different cap), third-party simulation services expose uncapped estimation — Tenderly's tenderly_estimateGas is one.

Behaviour is per-provider at the RPC layer, so verify on your own endpoint; the underlying cap is consensus-level and not negotiable. Reported 2025, post-Fusaka.

Source: adapted from a Stack Exchange answer by Paul Razvan Berg (question by Paul Razvan Berg), https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/172063/does-eth-estimategas-rpc-method-respect-eip-7825-tx-gas-limit — CC BY-SA 4.0