---
title: "Pagination drops the first and last links"
date: 2026-08-25
tags:
  - API
description: "Paginated API responses now advertise only next and prev, and omit the Link header entirely when a page has neither."
---

Paginated endpoints advertised four RFC 5988 relations in their `Link` header. `first` was only ever the endpoint called without a cursor, so it told you nothing you could not already do. `last` was worse: it walked backward from the end of the dataset, so its page boundaries never lined up with the ones a forward walk returns, and following it showed you items shifted against every other page.

Both are gone. `next` and `prev` are the supported way to page through results.

Two things follow. A response with neither a next nor a previous page now carries no `Link` header at all, so an absent header means there is nothing more to fetch. And the endpoints that only ever offered a way forward, such as pull requests and applications, now supply `prev` too.