Understanding Text Message Rate Limits

This article is a deep dive into text message rate limits and how it impacts text message sending through Rinsed

Why are there limits on how many messages I can send? Who enforces these limits?


Limits on how many messages you can send primarily exist to prevent spam and ensure the quality of service. Individual cell-phone subscribers are limited to 60 messages/minute, which most individual phone users will never experience.


In order to ensure quality of service, reduce SPAM and support legitimate business messaging the major carriers in the US (AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon) introduced a set of regulations called A2P 10DLC. As part of that change they created The Campaign Registry [TCR] as a centralized third party for recording and managing brands and marketing campaigns. TCR assigns a score to each brand and campaign registered and the carriers use that score to assign messaging rate limits based on their own internal proprietary formulas.


As part of your onboarding implementation, Rinsed submits brand and campaign registrations on your behalf using our experience and complete information to ensure quick approval and the highest possible scores and rate limits.


Note that T-Mobile enforces a much lower daily limit than the other carriers, if your audience has a high percentage of T-Mobile subscribers you may experience failed messages, or we may need to lower your configured rate limit. Additionally, T-Mobile is more restrictive enforcing its text message Code of Conduct

What affects my Brand Score?


Also referred to as “Trust Score”, your Brand score is calculated by TCR using the following factors: company size, company structure, years in operation and nature of work. Typically, there is little we can do to change your Brand Score, unless incorrect information was submitted during registration. 

What is my rate limit?


Because the downstream carriers (AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon and regional carriers like US Cellular) do not provide transparent rate limit information (they consider this proprietary), Rinsed works closely with our connectivity provider Twilio to set an initial rate limit in the Rinsed platform that is measured in messages per hour. Currently we do not expose the rate limit in the Rinsed UI; but your CSM can look it up. At minimum your rate limit will be 2000 messages per hour, but depending on the size of your business and your brand score limits can exceed 50,000 per hour.


It's important to note, rate limits only apply to Scheduled Text Messages. Confirmation texts and Campaign Text Messages are not rate limited by the Rinsed platform, but are still subject to carrier limits. Therefore, we try to set your rate limit with headroom to ensure that those more urgent messages get through.

What are sending hours?


The federal rules that govern text messaging (Telephone Consumer Protection Act) include guidelines about when it is acceptable to send text messages to customers. Those guidelines state that the phone subscriber should not be messaged before 8:00 AM and after 9:00 PM in the recipient's local time zone. By Default, Rinsed enforces sending hours from 8 AM ET - 9 PM ET. Talk with your CSM to change these hours. Sending hours only affect Scheduled Text Messages.

Can my rate limit be increased?


If your current rate limit is not sufficient to meet your campaign needs there are several options:

  • Depending on your brand score and historic deliverability, there may be headroom available to increase your rate limit at Rinsed without impacting deliverability of confirmation and campaign text messages. Your CSM is your point of contact for this and will work with our Rinsed Platform team to optimize this value.
  • Split your messaging into multiple audiences, with the high priority targets scheduled to be run first. For example, if my rate limit is 5000/hour and I have 50,000 retail contacts I want to message on a sunny day in the winter, I could split my targeting into two groups. The first group could be frequent visitors who are likely to have a better response rate and then schedule that to run first. For example, that might be 7000 of the contacts. Then, I could have a second message scheduled to run 10 minutes later that would queue up messages for the other 43,000 retail customers.