What happens to a transaction if a call to another method of the same class, also annotated with @Transactional, occurs inside a method marked with @Transactional?

If a method annotated with @Transactional calls another method of the same class, also with @Transactional, the internal call will not be treated as a separate transaction.

This happens because Spring uses proxies to manage transactions, and calls to methods within the same class bypass the proxy, calling methods directly. As a result, the @Transactional annotation of the second method is ignored, and all logic is executed within a single transaction opened by the outer method.

If you want the inner method to run in a separate transaction, you usually invoke it through a proxy (for example, by injecting the bean itself) or move the method to a separate service.

Example:

@Service
public class MyService {

    @Transactional
    public void outerMethod() {
        // transaction is open
        innerMethod(); // direct call, @Transactional annotation is ignored
    }

    @Transactional(propagation = Propagation.REQUIRES_NEW)
    public void innerMethod() {
        // a new transaction will not open on direct call
    }
}