Most US outbound teams meet compliance for the first time through a lawyer. That is not where the wall is. The wall is a carrier database, it sits in front of your first message, and it does not care what counsel signed off.
A2P 10DLC is the registration regime US carriers put in front of business text messaging over ordinary ten-digit numbers. If your brand and campaign are not registered and approved, your messages are blocked outright — and you still pay to send them. This page covers the carrier layer only. It does not re-argue consent law; that distinction is the point.
The short answer: A2P 10DLC is a US carrier registration system, run through The Campaign Registry, that every business sending SMS to US numbers from a ten-digit long code must complete. You register a Brand, then a Campaign use case. Standard Brands get a Trust Score from 0 to 100 that sets messages-per-second and daily carrier cap. Unregistered traffic is blocked. It is a carrier requirement, not a consent one — you need both.
What is A2P 10DLC and why does it exist?
A2P means application-to-person: messages sent by software, not typed on a handset. 10DLC is the ten-digit number they go out from. Twilio defines A2P 10DLC as “the standard that United States telecom carriers have put in place to ensure that SMS traffic to US end users through long code phone numbers is verified and consensual”.
Long codes were built for person-to-person texting and were never vetted, so bulk senders routed commercial traffic through a channel with no identity check. Carriers built one: a registry tying every sending number to a named legal entity and a declared use case. Capacity is now an attribute of your brand, not your number pool.
The two-step registration: Brand, then Campaign
Step one is the Brand. You submit your legal entity to The Campaign Registry, the third party that operates the registration layer for the carriers and describes itself as the backbone support for the 10DLC messaging ecosystem. For a US entity that means your EIN and legal name exactly as the IRS holds them: Twilio’s guidance is explicit that the name must match the CP 575 EIN confirmation letter, and that a DUNS number is not accepted for a US Standard Brand. A mismatch is a leading cause of a low score.
Step two is the Campaign — the use case: 2FA, account notifications, customer care, marketing, mixed. You describe who sends, who receives and why, supply sample messages, and document how recipients opted in. Marketing and mixed draw lower throughput than a single declared use case. A Brand can carry several Campaigns, but consent does not travel between them: Twilio’s consent guidance states that consent applies per campaign, and that enrolling a customer into multiple campaigns based on a single opt-in will get the campaign rejected.
What is a Trust Score, and what moves it?
A registered Standard Brand goes through secondary vetting, which returns a Trust Score from 0 to 100. Twilio describes it as a reputation algorithm reviewing criteria relating to your company, and states plainly that the higher the score, the higher your throughput.
Two things matter operationally. Twilio states that Trust Scores are static and do not automatically change over time — there is no reputation you earn back by behaving well for six months. And the published causes of a low score are unglamorous: data discrepancies against your official business registration, and a small brand footprint, with Twilio noting that smaller organizations generally receive lower scores. A shell entity holding one campaign scores low, and budget does not fix it.
Registration paths compared
| Path | Who it is for | Ceiling | Trade-off |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sole Proprietor | Individuals and small businesses with no Tax ID | 1 Campaign, 1 number, 1,000 segments/day to T-Mobile, 15/minute to AT&T | Cheapest, but cannot carry a real outbound program |
| Low Volume Standard | EIN, under roughly 6,000 segments/day | Multiple use cases and numbers, but skips secondary vetting, so throughput sits at the bottom tier | Avoids the vetting fee and a bad score, but the top tiers are unavailable |
| Standard | EIN, above roughly 6,000 segments/day | Trust Score 0–100 sets throughput and daily cap; the only route to the high tiers | You accept the score given; appealing it is a process, not a phone call |
Throughput and daily limits by tier
Throughput is measured in message segments per second (MPS); a segment is up to 160 GSM-7 characters, so a long message burns more than one. The MPS column below is Twilio’s published allocation for declared use cases; the daily column is T-Mobile’s cap by Trust Score, both read at source in August 2026. They are carrier-set and they change.
| Trust Score | Total SMS MPS toward major US networks | T-Mobile daily cap (segments + MMS) |
|---|---|---|
| 75–100 | 225 | 200,000 per day |
| 50–74 | 120 | 40,000 per day |
| 25–49 | 12 | 10,000 per day |
| 1–24 | 12 | 2,000 per day |
| Sole Proprietor (no score) | 2.25 | 1,000 per day |
One detail catches teams out: the T-Mobile cap is applied at EIN level and shared across every brand, campaign, account and platform under that EIN, so a second vendor splits one cap rather than adding a second. Exceeding it fails messages rather than queuing them.
Twilio says a declared use case may receive higher MPS than a mixed or marketing use case at the same Trust Score, though the two published tables currently carry the same numbers for scored brands. The real drop is the separate Low Volume Mixed campaign type, which Twilio fixes at the lowest throughput tier — 3.75 MPS — regardless of Trust Score. Outbound lead generation is mixed or marketing traffic by any honest description.
What happens to unregistered traffic
Nothing subtle. Twilio’s help center states that all SMS and MMS to US numbers from unregistered 10DLC numbers have been fully blocked since September 1, 2023, returning error 30034 — and that Twilio’s messaging rates still apply to blocked messages. You pay to send into a wall. Partial registration counts as unregistered: a submitted-but-unapproved campaign, or an approved campaign whose numbers were never attached to the right messaging service, both block.
Registered traffic is not immune. Twilio publishes T-Mobile’s penalty schedule for non-compliant messaging — $10,000 per content violation, $1,000 for program evasion such as snowshoeing or number recycling, and severity-tiered fines of $2,000, $1,000 and $500 — and states these are passed through to the customer. Carrier fines, not regulator fines, and they arrive without a hearing.
What actually gets a campaign rejected
Twilio publishes its rejection codes with the correction required for each. Reviewers are checking one thing: whether your described program and your observable public evidence match.
- Sample messages that do not match the use case (30893). Samples must reflect real messages, bracket templated fields, and at least one must carry your business name.
- Public link shorteners (30892). Twilio does not accept public URL shorteners in sample messages; carriers expect a dedicated, branded short domain belonging to your business, or the full URL. A website URL that does not resolve fails too (30891).
- Opt-in evidence that cannot be verified (30896). Every method must be described, and where opt-in happens behind a login, on paper, verbally or in-app you must supply a publicly reachable screenshot. The site needs a privacy policy and terms of service.
- Vague opt-out handling (30887), or a HELP reply missing the brand name (30890) plus a phone number or email.
- A vague campaign description (30886), one naming the platform rather than the business actually sending (30894), or a brand support email on a public domain such as Gmail (30881).
Twilio also specifies what your opt-in confirmation message must contain: the program or brand name, customer care contact information, opt-out instructions, a disclosure that the messages are recurring and how frequent they are, and a “Message and data rates may apply” disclosure. One date to put on the calendar: from September 15, 2026, Twilio moves A2P 10DLC and Toll-Free Verification onto a single unified content and messaging policy, with new and refined rejection codes.
Registration is not consent, and consent is not throughput
A2P 10DLC is an industry requirement enforced by commercial contract and network filtering. The TCPA is federal law enforced by regulators and private litigants. An approved campaign does not make a message lawful — carriers approve a described program, not each recipient’s consent record. Equally, immaculate consent buys no capacity: if your brand is unregistered, a documented double opt-in list is blocked exactly as hard as a scraped one.
CTIA marks the boundary in its own Messaging Principles and Best Practices (May 2023 version): “CTIA’s Principles and Best Practices do not constitute or convey legal advice and should not be used as a substitute for obtaining legal advice from qualified counsel.” They are voluntary; carriers and aggregators layer stricter rules on top.
The legal layer is covered in TCPA compliance for AI voice and SMS agents and the 2027 TCPA revoke-all rule; the checklist that sits above both is our AI outbound compliance checklist for enterprise.
Australian operators will recognize the shape but not the mechanics: Australia has no throughput-scored equivalent, only the ACMA-administered Sender ID Register, covered in SMS Sender ID registration in Australia. Two markets, two unrelated processes.
How long it really takes
Twilio’s guidance, read in August 2026, gives brand registration as typically a few minutes once your information is ready, occasionally up to 24 hours, with manual secondary vetting taking up to seven days where there is a discrepancy. Campaign review is the variable one: Twilio’s own banners currently quote five to ten days, ten to fifteen days, and about seven business days for standard use cases — on the same site, in the same week.
Plan two to four weeks from first submission to sending, budget a rejection-and-resubmit cycle for a marketing use case, and never put an unregistered number in a launch plan. The failure mode is not that registration is hard; it is that nobody starts it until the creative is done.
Where this sits in a real outbound program
We have booked 50,769+ AI-set sales appointments since 2017 and generated over 1M leads across AU and US programs, with 25 filmed client case studies. Every US SMS component runs on registered 10DLC traffic, because there is no other kind.
Registration is mostly done once; where it turns strategic is use-case selection. A database reactivation program — the kind we ran at scale for Colliers — is marketing or mixed traffic by any honest description. Registering it as customer care because approval is easier is exactly the misdescription reviewers look for.
One question settles a lot when buying outbound: whose EIN is the brand registered under? If it is your vendor’s, so are the Trust Score, the daily cap and the campaign history — one for the list in lead generation for scale-ups in the USA. If you want this layer handled alongside the outbound, our US AI sales agents run inside it, or book a call.
This page is general information about carrier and industry registration requirements, not legal advice. Fees, throughput allocations and review times are set by US carriers and The Campaign Registry and change without notice. Confirm your own obligations with your messaging provider and qualified counsel.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need A2P 10DLC registration if I already comply with the TCPA?
Yes. They are separate regimes. The TCPA governs whether you had lawful consent to contact someone; A2P 10DLC governs whether US carriers will carry your traffic at all. Express written consent gives you no throughput, and an approved campaign is not evidence your consent was valid. You need both, and they fail independently.
What does A2P 10DLC registration cost?
Registration fees are set by The Campaign Registry and passed through by aggregators. As published by Twilio in August 2026: a US A2P Standard Brand is $46 one-time including secondary vetting; Sole Proprietor and Low Volume Standard brands are $4.50; campaign use case registration carries a $15 vetting fee; and monthly campaign fees run $10 for Standard, $2 for Sole Proprietor and $1.50 for Low Volume Mixed. Per-message carrier surcharges apply on top. These are third-party fees and they change — TCR raised several on August 1, 2025.
What is a good Trust Score?
Seventy-five or above is the tier that unlocks Twilio’s top published allocation of 225 total SMS segments per second toward the major US networks and a 200,000 per day T-Mobile cap. Below 25 you sit at 12 segments per second and a 2,000 per day cap, which will not carry a serious program. The score is static once assigned, so the leverage is in submitting exactly matching entity data the first time.
Why did my campaign get rejected when everything looked correct?
Almost always because something cannot be verified from outside. Twilio’s listed causes include sample messages that do not match the declared use case, public link shorteners, a website that does not resolve or carries no privacy policy, an opt-in method described but not evidenced with a screenshot, and a HELP reply that omits the brand name. Reviewers match your description against public evidence, not your intentions.
Does registration transfer if I change messaging providers?
The brand does, in that it is tied to your EIN rather than a platform. Campaigns are provisioned per provider and generally have to be re-registered. The question that matters is whose EIN the brand sits under: if your vendor registered it under their own entity, your sending history and Trust Score stay with them.
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