Is “As Per Your Request” Correct? The Verdict, the History, and Better Options

Nothing in the syntax of as per your request is broken. Per is a preposition, it takes a noun phrase, and as per as a compound preposition meaning “in accordance with” has been in commercial English for centuries. It is also standard, unremarkable usage in Indian business and official correspondence, and it remains ordinary in contracts, notices and statutory letters on every continent. Any teacher who marked it as an error was teaching the wrong lesson.

The complaint is about register, not grammar. In US and UK business writing of the last seventy years the phrase has been steadily evicted by the plain-language movement, so a reader in Chicago or Manchester parses it as officialese — the linguistic equivalent of a form letter, and sometimes as a signal of outsourced support correspondence. The information it carries is no different from as you requested; the cost is attention and warmth.

My own practice is boringly split. In a contract cross-reference — “the notice period is as per Clause 7” — I would not dream of replacing it; precision there is the point. In a first email to a new client I would leave it out, not because it is wrong but because it spends reader goodwill before you have said anything worth spending it on. The alternatives in section 5 keep the correctness and drop the cost.

Per carries two senses in modern English, and both are productive. The first is distributive, meaning for each: sixty dollars per person, kilometres per hour, twice per week. This use is uncontroversial everywhere. The second means according to, as directed by: per your instructions, per the contract, per section 5. This is the commercial-legal sense, the one that has been argued about, and the one inside as per.

Now the constraint that decides what is grammatical: as per behaves as a preposition, and a preposition takes a noun phrase. That gives “as per your request”, “as per the attached file”, “as per Clause 7”, “as per company policy”. It also explains why “as per you requested” is ungrammatical — that is a clause, with a subject and a verb, and there is nothing for per to govern. A clause needs the conjunction as instead: as you requested, as we discussed, as agreed last week. This is the single most common real error in the family, and it is worth avoiding on grammar alone, leaving register aside.

The transatlantic split is real and worth memorising. American business prose mostly dropped the as: per your request is the ordinary semi-formal shape there, and several American usage guides disliked per in the “according to” sense altogether, recommending according to or as in general writing. That objection never won in commercial prose. British legal and commercial usage retained as per more comfortably, and Indian English uses it as the default formula.

Finally, keep as per apart from according to. According to neutrally reports a source of information — “according to the report, revenue rose four percent” — while per and as per signal compliance with an instruction: “as per your instructions, we shipped on Friday.” Swapping them changes what you claim to be doing: quoting, or obeying.

Per is Latin for through, by means of, and that older meaning is the bridge between its two modern senses. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century mercantile correspondence ran on fixed formulas, and letters opened with phrases such as “per your favour of 12th June” or “per your esteemed order” — that is, “through your letter, I have received your instruction”. Once the postal reference faded, what remained was the sense of “as directed by you”, which is exactly the meaning as per has today.

The phrase travelled to India with the clerical English of colonial administration, where precise, formulaic correspondence was a job requirement and a matter of record. Those formulas were taught, examined and standardised, and they stayed in use long after independence: in Indian official letters, government notices and routine business correspondence, as per is simply the expected phrasing, and leaving it out can make a sentence read as abrupt.

In Britain and America the same phrase went the other way. The plain-language movement set out to strip officialdom from prose, and it succeeded. Ernest Gowers wrote Plain Words in 1948 for officials and expanded it into The Complete Plain Words in 1954, and the advice running through both was to choose the short common word over the bureaucratic one; decades later Bryan Garner’s Modern American Usage listed as per among the stuffy legalisms to avoid in US legal and business prose. Style guides followed, and the phrase disappeared from ordinary American office email.

That history explains the argument in section 1. Two groups of competent speakers inherited the same commercial formula, and a twentieth-century reform movement reached only one of them. When an Indian colleague writes “as per your request” and an American reader winces, neither is wrong about English; they are reading from different style manuals.

Put one sentence in a thread with four readers and you get four verdicts. The Indian procurement officer registers nothing: as per your request is the correct formal register for the situation. The UK lawyer, reading a covering email that accompanies a formal notice, also registers nothing, because the letter itself will use the same language. The American marketing manager a small company is pitching to reads it as distance and template. The recruiter opening the first line of an application reads it as a sign that the writer reached for a stock phrase instead of a sentence.

Keep it where it is standard. Indian statutory and official letters, government and bank correspondence, contract and clause cross-references (“the notice period is as per Clause 12”), covering notes that reference a written instruction, and any document whose audience expects formality. In these places the phrase is not dated, it is precise, and replacing it can look like you are avoiding the paper trail.

Avoid it where the reader is deciding whether to like working with you. US and UK client email, outreach, internal messages to colleagues, and the opening line of a job application. The cost is not a correction from a grammarian; nobody will write to tell you. The cost is a fraction of a second of friction repeated through a long thread, and a voice that sounds like a department rather than a person.

That last point deserves naming, because it is the real reason plain-language reformers targeted the phrase. As per your request, the documents have been dispatched is a distancing construction: it removes you as the actor, removes the reader as the requester, and hides the moment of deciding. Compare as you asked, I’ve sent the documents — they should reach you Thursday. Same facts, one human in each sentence. This is the same problem we cover in active and passive voice in business writing, and the phrase so often arrives in the company of the passive that you can treat one as a warning sign for the other.

The replacement is rarely one phrase for another; it is a ladder. Choose a rung by how formal the situation genuinely is, and by how much of the sentence you are willing to take responsibility for:

The bigger gain is usually sentence shape rather than phrase choice. Name the thing and the action and the opening formula becomes unnecessary: Here is the report you asked for on Monday; I’ve attached the two quotes you wanted — the second one is cheaper but slower. Notice that these versions delete a comma clause and add a decision, which is why they read as competent rather than merely polite.

If you draft emails under deadline and want a second pass, run the text through a free English grammar checker before sending; it will not police register for you, but it will catch the genuinely ungrammatical cousin, as per you requested, along with the missing article and the stray comma that travel with boilerplate.

As per rarely arrives alone; it belongs to a cluster of correspondence formulas that share the same history and the same reception. Each deserves its own verdict rather than a ban list.

kindly revert. In Indian English, revert is widely used to mean “reply”, and “kindly revert” is a normal polite request. In US and UK English, revert means “return to an earlier state” — a policy reverts, a lawn reverts to rough — so the request confuses the reader or sounds pretentious. “Kindly revert back” is worse, since back repeats the returning. Write “could you reply by Friday?” or “let me know what you think.”

do the needful. Standard and efficient in Indian administrative and business English; archaic elsewhere, and one of the fastest tells of a copied template for readers outside the subcontinent. Say what is needed and by when: “please approve the budget so we can order the hardware.”

please find attached. A survivor of the era when a letter arrived with paper enclosed under a separate cover, and find was an instruction to the recipient. It is grammatical and still common, and it is also three words of throat-clearing. “I’ve attached the invoice” or “the quote is attached” says the same thing in fewer words and names the sender as the one doing the attaching.

further to my email below / with reference to the above. These point at the physical layout of a thread rather than at its content, and they get strange as soon as a mobile client reorders the quoting. Reference the subject instead: “following up on the delivery dates”. If you want the rest of this cluster dealt with in one pass, our guide to business email grammar mistakes walks through the sentences that most often cost writers credibility, and the free practice guide has exercises on the underlying patterns.