Control plane policing (CoPP) is a mechanism to police incoming traffic to the control plane for control plane protection and routing stability. Currently, networking switches are statically configured for CoPP limits in hardware/firmware. Such an approach of using a static CoPP limit does not work well in dynamic scenarios where one protocol load could be more than the other. The present patent document discloses embodiments of dynamic CoPP limit derivation. CoPP limits are initially estimated based on protocol configuration and are dynamically updated based on application load. A congestion notification may be sent to a sender to limit a transmission rate. Use of dynamic CoPP limit embodiments have advantages of faster protocol convergence, efficient slow packet processing notification to peer, and effective CoPP drop setting based on application load.