It also works well to specify @Transactional in a custom method of the Spring Data JPA interface, as in this example. This brings a lot of convenience to the developer, as they don't have to re-write each custom query with @Transactional in an outer contained class. In typical real-time business logic, most of the time the transaction propagation setting will use the default value of Propagation.REQUIRED, so you can also naturally carry over transactions created at higher Service levels.