Where can I find the pooled connection string in my Neon dashboard?

Open your project in the Neon Console, click Connect on the Project Dashboard, and turn the Connection pooling toggle on. The hostname in the connection string gains a -pooler suffix, which routes traffic through Neon's PgBouncer pool. The toggle is on by default for new projects.

Get the pooled string

Sign in to the Neon Console and select your project.
On the Project Dashboard, click Connect.
Pick a Branch, Compute, Database, and Role.
Make sure Connection pooling is on.
Copy the connection string.

A pooled URL looks like:

postgresql://alex:AbC123dEf@ep-cool-darkness-a1b2c3d4-pooler.us-east-2.aws.neon.tech/dbname?sslmode=require&channel_binding=require

The direct URL for the same compute is identical except the hostname has no -pooler:

postgresql://alex:AbC123dEf@ep-cool-darkness-a1b2c3d4.us-east-2.aws.neon.tech/dbname?sslmode=require&channel_binding=require

See Connect from any app for the field-by-field breakdown.

Pooled vs direct: which one to use

Neon's pooled endpoint supports up to 10,000 concurrent client connections by multiplexing them over a smaller pool of real Postgres connections. Use it when you'd otherwise exhaust max_connections (104 on a 0.25 CU compute, 419 on a 1 CU compute).

Use case	Use this
Serverless functions (Vercel, AWS Lambda, Cloudflare Workers)	Pooled
Web apps with many short-lived connections	Pooled
ORMs (Prisma, Drizzle) in production	Pooled
Schema migrations and `pg_dump`	Direct
`LISTEN`/`NOTIFY`	Direct
Logical replication	Direct
Long-running analytics or session-level features	Direct

The pooled endpoint runs PgBouncer in transaction mode, which means session-level features like SET, LISTEN/NOTIFY, and SQL PREPARE aren't available. Use a direct connection for those.

See Connection pooling for the full guidance, including the connection limits per compute size.

You can use both

A common pattern is to use the pooled URL for runtime queries and the direct URL for migrations. Most app frameworks let you set two environment variables (for example, DATABASE_URL for pooled, DIRECT_URL for direct). Prisma's directUrl field is one such example.