Where should transaction boundaries be placed in a Spring application?

Places a short transaction around one application use case while keeping remote calls, user interaction, and bulk work outside.

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TL;DR

I usually place the transaction on an application-service method that performs one use case, such as reserving inventory and recording the order. Repositories participate in that transaction rather than each defining an unrelated commit. The boundary should be long enough to protect the invariant and short enough to release the connection and locks promptly. Validation that does not require locked database state can happen before it.

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Atomic units of work, service boundaries, connection lifetime, external side effects, invariants, and failure outcomes.

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Core answer
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A transaction should protect one database consistency decision, not an arbitrary layer or an entire request by default.
I usually place the transaction on an application-service method that performs one use case, such as reserving inventory and recording the order. Repositories participate in that transaction rather than each defining an unrelated commit. The boundary should be long enough to protect the invariant and short enough to release the connection and locks promptly. Validation that does not require locked database state can happen before it.
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Stronger answer
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I avoid holding a database transaction open during remote HTTP calls, message waits, file processing, or user interaction because latency and failure then consume connections and extend lock duration. If a database change and message publication must coordinate, I use an outbox or another explicit workflow rather than pretending one local transaction covers both systems. Read-only operations can still need a transaction for a consistent persistence context, but that is a deliberate choice.

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Starting and committing a transaction in each repository.
Keeping a transaction open across a slow HTTP call.
Assuming a local transaction includes a message broker.

Where should transaction boundaries be placed in a Spring application?

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