Vercel middleware can now skip the request body entirely

Vercel added a skipMiddlewareRequestBody option on 8 October that stops the client’s request body from being forwarded to Routing Middleware at all.

Set it to true in vercel.json or vercel.ts and middleware invocations no longer receive the body, which reduces Fast Origin Transfer usage and can improve time to first byte, especially on requests with large payloads. It defaults to false, so nothing changes unless you opt in, and it needs a redeploy to take effect. Vercel Functions and rewrite targets are unaffected: they still get the full body to read and process as normal.

{
  "skipMiddlewareRequestBody": true
}

Why it matters: most middleware only inspects headers, cookies or the URL, never the body, so this is a free win for a common case. If your middleware does read the body for anything, leave this off.

The caveat: it’s opt-in per project, not automatic, so existing middleware keeps paying the old cost until someone flips the flag.