Methods, systems and computer program products are provided for providing transactional quality of service providing transaction service level information from an application requesting a data transmission transaction to a communication process executing on a data processing system. The transaction service level information is provided separate from the data for the data transmission transaction. A quality of service level associated with the data transmission transaction is determined based on the transaction service level information received from the application. Other embodiments also provide for establishing a quality of service level without reference to transaction data content while further embodiments provide for establishing a quality of service level for responses.