A2P 10DLC registration: what it costs and how long it takes

If your agent sends application-to-person SMS from a standard 10-digit US number, you must register. This is not a best practice or a deliverability optimisation. Carriers have blocked unregistered A2P traffic outright since December 2024, and unregistered messages do not arrive.

Not sure which of these applies to you? The 10DLC readiness checker asks five questions and returns the list.

What you register

Two things, in order.

The brand. Your legal company information, submitted for vetting. Roughly $4 as a one-off.

The campaign. Tied to the number, describing the use case with sample messages and supporting detail. Around $10 per campaign per month, ongoing.

A vetting agency assesses the brand. The campaign is assessed against its stated use case, which is why the sample messages matter: a campaign registered for appointment reminders that starts sending marketing is a campaign that gets filtered.

What it costs, and what it saves

The arithmetic is straightforward and rarely spelled out: the per-message gap of roughly $0.008 means registration pays for itself somewhere around a couple of thousand messages a month. Below that it is a compliance cost. Above it, it is cheaper than not registering, and that is before unregistered messages get blocked rather than merely charged for.

Separately, T-Mobile set SMS pass-through fees effective 19 January 2026 at $0.0045 outbound and $0.0025 inbound, applied across 10DLC, short code and toll-free traffic.

How long it takes

Two clocks, and the second one is the one that moves.

The brand. The Campaign Registry approves brands, in Twilio's words, "within a few minutes of submission". The form itself is a quarter of an hour.

The campaign. The registry "typically approves campaigns within several days", and then a queue sits on top of that. On 11 September 2026 Twilio's quickstart said campaign reviews "take 10–15 days", and its help centre said the same day that they were "currently taking 5–10 days". Both sentences begin "due to an increase in campaign submissions". The figure is the backlog, not the rule, and it changes without the page saying so; the number to plan on is the longer one. A rejection restarts it, and a request for more information has to be answered within 24 hours or the campaign lapses.

So: minutes for the brand, one to three weeks for the campaign, and the campaign is what your number waits on.

Toll-free is a different path

Toll-free numbers do not use 10DLC. They have their own verification process, which takes one to three weeks and permits up to 40 messages per second once approved. For an agent expecting bursty throughput and willing to wait, it is a reasonable alternative. It is not faster, and it is not exempt.

Short codes are a third path again, with higher throughput, higher cost and a longer approval.

RCS is now in the same system

The Campaign Registry handles RCS agent vetting alongside 10DLC, with RCS agent vetting listed at $75 under its revised fee schedule effective January 2026. If you are planning an RCS path as an escape from SMS registration, it is not one.

What this means for an agent

Three practical consequences that get missed:

Budget the time, not just the money. The fees are trivial. The delay is not, one to three weeks on the campaign, and it lands squarely on your launch date. Start registration before you finish building.

Your consent flow is part of the registration. Campaigns are assessed on how people opt in, and STOP and HELP handling is not optional. An agent that people text first has an easier story here than one that reaches out; if yours initiates, be able to show where consent came from.

A managed iMessage provider may absorb this. Several providers state $0 A2P registration and $0 carrier surcharges as part of a flat monthly fee. If you are comparing a managed iMessage API against building on a raw SMS provider, this is real money and real weeks on one side of the comparison. See iMessage API providers, compared.