Two Common @Transactional Pitfalls That Trip Up Senior Java Developers

A Java developer with 13 years of experience and a background in interviewing candidates at multinational companies has highlighted two widely misunderstood behaviors of Spring's @Transactional annotation. The first pitfall involves calling a @Transactional method from within the same class, which bypasses Spring's proxy wrapper and silently disables transaction management. The second trap is the assumption that @Transactional rolls back on all exceptions — by default, it only rolls back on unchecked exceptions, leaving checked exceptions to commit incomplete data. Both issues are difficult to catch in testing and tend to surface only in production, potentially causing data inconsistencies. Fixes include routing internal calls through a self-injected proxy and using the rollbackFor = Exception.class parameter to ensure full rollback coverage.