Time to Live (TTL)
Time to Live (TTL) is a field on DNS records that controls how long each record is cached and — as a result — how long it takes for record updates to reach your end users.
Longer TTLs speed up DNS lookups ↗ by increasing the chance of cached results, but a longer TTL also means that updates to your records take longer to go into effect.
By default, all proxied records have a TTL of Auto, which is set to 300 seconds. This value cannot be edited.
Since only records used for IP address resolution can be proxied, this setting ensures that potential changes to the assigned anycast IP address will take effect quickly, as recursive resolvers will not cache them for longer than 300 seconds (five minutes).
For DNS only records, you can choose a TTL between 30 seconds (Enterprise) or 60 seconds (non-Enterprise) and 1 day.
A TTL of Auto is set to 300 seconds (five minutes).
Nameserver TTL is a separate feature and only affects Cloudflare nameservers and custom nameservers. For other NS records on your DNS records table, TTL is controlled by their respective TTL fields.