diff --git a/src/maxtext/configs/base.yml b/src/maxtext/configs/base.yml
index fb58aa79b4..442e67d70c 100644
--- a/src/maxtext/configs/base.yml
+++ b/src/maxtext/configs/base.yml
@@ -191,6 +191,11 @@ num_experts_per_tok: 1
 megablox: true
 sparse_matmul: true
 capacity_factor: -1.0 # a factor to decide expert capacity for token dropping, and no dropping by default
+ragged_buffer_factor: -1.0 # a factor to determine the size of the ragged buffer for routed MoE activations.
+# By default (-1), this buffer will be worst case size to ensure no dropping.
+# When set to 1.0 this buffer if set to the size assuming perfectly balanced. If the routing dictates
+# a size larger than this then tokens will be dropped.
+# In general if ragged_buffer_factor>0, the ragged_buffer_size is is balanced_size * ragged_buffer_factor.
 load_balance_loss_weight: 0.0 # weight for the load balance loss
 use_random_routing: false # whether to use random routing for debug/test purpose
 use_custom_sort_vjp: true # whether to use a custom VJP sort for efficient backward pass processing in sparse matmul
diff --git a/src/maxtext/configs/types.py b/src/maxtext/configs/types.py
index 454a9f23f5..d705a3be5c 100644
--- a/src/maxtext/configs/types.py
+++ b/src/maxtext/configs/types.py
@@ -641,6 +641,7 @@ class MoEGeneral(BaseModel):
   num_experts: PositiveInt = Field(1, description="The total number of experts in each MoE layer.")
   num_experts_per_tok: PositiveInt = Field(1, description="The number of experts to route each token to.")
   capacity_factor: float = Field(-1.0, description="Expert capacity factor. If < 0, no token dropping.")
+  ragged_buffer_factor: float = Field(-1.0, description="Ragged buffer factor. If < 0, ragged buffer is worst case size.")
   load_balance_loss_weight: NonNegativeFloat = Field(0.0, description="Weight for the load balancing auxiliary loss.")
   use_custom_sort_vjp: bool = Field(
       True,
diff --git a/src/maxtext/layers/moe.py b/src/maxtext/layers/moe.py
index 314c450b03..a66870fa4b 100644
--- a/src/maxtext/layers/moe.py
+++ b/src/maxtext/layers/moe.py
@@ -887,6 +887,14 @@ def transform_array(input_array, shard_id, strategy, is_batch_sharded):
     )
     return input_offsets, send_sizes, output_offsets, recv_sizes
 
+  def get_ragged_buffer_size(self, local_expert_size, local_batch):
+    if self.config.ragged_buffer_factor > 0.0:
+      balanced_size = local_batch
+      return int(balanced_size * self.config.ragged_buffer_factor)
+    else:
+      max_local_experts_per_tok = min(local_expert_size, self.config.num_experts_per_tok)
+      return int(local_batch * max_local_experts_per_tok)
+
   def transform_bias(self, experts_index, *biases):
     """Selects bias values for a variable number of bias tensors based on chosen experts."""
     return tuple(bias[experts_index] for bias in biases)
@@ -1180,8 +1188,7 @@ def wrapper(x, logits, pre_bias_logits, w0, w1, wo, w0_bias, w1_bias, wo_bias, r
             # In the worst case, all of the global input data is assigned to each expert in the current shard.
             # This would result in num_expert_shards * input_size * experts_per_shard assignments. However, if
             # experts_per_shard > num_experts_per_tok we cannot assign more than num_experts_per_tok to all of the inputs.
-            max_local_experts_per_tok = min(local_expert_size, self.config.num_experts_per_tok)
-            buffer_size = int(num_expert_parallelism * batch_size * sequence_length * max_local_experts_per_tok)
+            buffer_size = self.get_ragged_buffer_size(local_expert_size, jnp.shape(x)[0])
             output_shape = jax.lax.empty((buffer_size, self.config.emb_dim), dtype=x.dtype)
 
             x = jax.lax.ragged_all_to_all(