10DLC Throughput and Trust Scores: How Many Messages Can You Actually Send?

Quick answer: how much can you send on 10DLC?

10DLC throughput is set per carrier from your brand's trust score (0-100, assigned by The Campaign Registry's vetting partner). AT&T assigns a message class with a per-minute limit: roughly 4,500 SMS per minute (about 75 per second) for scores of 75 and above, 2,400 per minute for 50-74, 240 per minute for 1-49, and 75 per minute for unvetted low-volume brands. T-Mobile applies a daily cap per brand: 200,000 messages for 75-100, 40,000 for 50-74, 10,000 for 25-49 and 2,000 for 0-24. Verizon publishes no brand-level daily cap and rate-limits per number instead. If you need more than a few hundred thousand messages a day, or more than about 75 per second, a dedicated short code or verified toll-free number is the next step.

This article is part of the Signalmash 10DLC compliance hub, which covers registration, approval, throughput, error codes and number-type selection in one place.

Most 10DLC guides stop at "get registered." Registration is only the ticket in. What decides whether your appointment reminders go out in four minutes or four hours is throughput, and throughput on 10DLC is not one number. It is three different carrier rules keyed to a single score you may never have seen.

What "high-throughput messaging" actually means

Throughput is how many messages a carrier will accept from you in a given window. On 10DLC there are two flavours you have to plan for at the same time:

• Rate limits, measured in messages per minute (TPM) or per second (MPS). AT&T works this way. Exceed the rate and messages queue or fail with a carrier error.
• Volume caps, measured per day. T-Mobile works this way. Once you hit the cap, everything else to T-Mobile subscribers fails until midnight Pacific.

Both are applied at the brand level (your EIN), not per phone number and not per campaign, so spreading traffic across 20 numbers does not raise the ceiling. That is the single most common misunderstanding we untangle for new customers.

The trust score: where the limits come from

When you register a brand with The Campaign Registry (TCR), a vetting partner scores the business from 0 to 100. The score is built from public and commercial data: how long the company has existed, whether the legal name, EIN, address and website agree with each other, how large the company's footprint is, and whether there is any negative history attached to the numbers or the domain. Brands that skip third-party vetting receive the lowest tier by default.

The score drives the throughput tables below. It does not drive filtering decisions (those are about message content and complaint rates), which is why a brand with a score of 90 can still see messages blocked if the campaign content drifts from what was registered.

AT&T: message classes and TPM

AT&T maps the trust score to a message class. Each class has a per-minute limit that applies across all numbers under the brand.

• Class A/B (score 75-100): 4,500 SMS per minute, 2,400 MMS per minute. Roughly 75 SMS per second.
• Class C/D (score 50-74): 2,400 SMS per minute, 1,200 MMS per minute. Roughly 40 per second.
• Class E/F (score 1-49): 240 SMS per minute, 150 MMS per minute. Roughly 4 per second.
• Class T (low-volume standard, unvetted): 75 SMS per minute, 50 MMS per minute.
• Special classes: charity (P) 2,400 TPM; election (K) and emergency (X) 4,500 TPM; agents and franchises (N) 60 TPM per number; trial (Z) 6 TPM.

Because these are per-minute limits, bursty sending matters. A 10,000-message blast from a Class E brand takes about 42 minutes to clear AT&T; the same blast from Class A clears in a little over two minutes.

T-Mobile: daily caps per brand

T-Mobile (including the former Sprint network) does not rate-limit by the minute. It caps the total number of SMS and MMS your brand can send to T-Mobile subscribers in a day, reset at midnight Pacific.

• Score 75-100: 200,000 messages per day (Russell 3000 companies are placed here automatically).
• Score 50-74: 40,000 per day.
• Score 25-49: 10,000 per day.
• Score 0-24 or unvetted: 2,000 per day.
• Sole proprietor: 1,000 per day.

T-Mobile subscribers are roughly a third of US mobile users, so a brand on the 2,000 cap effectively tops out around 6,000 total messages a day before T-Mobile traffic starts failing. T-Mobile also limits campaigns to 49 phone numbers unless a number pool is approved, and charges a $250 non-use fee if a campaign has no numbers attached after 60 days.

Verizon: per-number rate limits, no brand cap

Verizon publishes no brand-level daily volume cap for registered 10DLC traffic. Throughput is governed per number and per campaign by your messaging provider's connection to Verizon, typically in the low single digits of messages per second per number for registered campaigns. In practice Verizon is rarely the bottleneck; AT&T's TPM class and T-Mobile's daily cap are the two numbers to plan around.

How to raise your trust score

1. Complete third-party (external) vetting. Unvetted brands sit at the bottom tier on both AT&T and T-Mobile. Standard vetting through TCR costs about $40 and usually returns a score within a few business days.
2. Make every record agree. Legal name, EIN, address, website domain and the contact email domain should match your IRS and Secretary of State records exactly. Mismatches are the most common cause of low scores.
3. Have a real web presence. A live website on the registered domain with a privacy policy, terms and a physical address.
4. Appeal if the score looks wrong. Appeals are free within 45 days of the score; after that a secondary vetting fee (about $40) applies. Attach documentation that resolves the discrepancy.
5. Ask for enhanced vetting only when it matters. Enhanced vetting (about $100) is needed for special use cases and for brands that want a documented path to the top tier, but it does not change the scoring criteria.

When 10DLC is not enough

If your peak day exceeds the T-Mobile cap for your tier, or you need sustained sending above about 75 messages per second, 10DLC is the wrong tool regardless of score.

• Verified toll-free numbers support higher throughput than most 10DLC tiers, with no trust-score tiers; verification takes about a week.
• Dedicated short codes deliver hundreds of messages per second with no daily brand cap, at roughly $500-$1,000 per month plus an 8-12 week approval.

Our short code vs 10DLC vs toll-free comparison walks through the decision by volume, speed and cost.

How Signalmash handles throughput for you

Signalmash registers the brand, runs vetting, watches the score and tells you which AT&T class and T-Mobile tier you landed in before you send the first campaign. Our platform queues and paces traffic to each carrier's limit so a blast never fails mid-send, alerts you when you are approaching the T-Mobile daily cap, and provisions toll-free numbers or short codes when your volume outgrows 10DLC. Carrier surcharges and TCR fees are passed through at cost.

Book a 15-minute call with Signalmash and we will review your brand, campaigns and throughput before you submit anything to the carriers.

People also ask

What does high-throughput messaging mean and which platforms deliver it?

High-throughput messaging means sending thousands of messages per minute without carrier throttling. On 10DLC the ceiling is set by your trust score (up to about 4,500 per minute on AT&T and 200,000 per day on T-Mobile); beyond that you need a verified toll-free number or a dedicated short code. Signalmash, Bandwidth, Telnyx, Twilio and Sinch all offer short-code and toll-free routes; Signalmash provisions them and manages the per-carrier pacing as part of onboarding.

How many messages per day can I send on 10DLC?

It depends on your brand's trust score and the carrier. T-Mobile caps a brand at 2,000, 10,000, 40,000 or 200,000 messages per day depending on the score tier; AT&T limits by the minute (75 to 4,500 SMS per minute) rather than per day; Verizon publishes no brand-level daily cap. A vetted brand with a score of 75 or more can realistically send several hundred thousand messages a day across the three carriers.

Does adding more phone numbers increase 10DLC throughput?

No. AT&T's per-minute class and T-Mobile's daily cap are applied to the brand (EIN), not to individual numbers, so adding numbers does not raise the limit. More numbers help only with Verizon per-number rate limits and with keeping conversation threads separate. To send more, raise the trust score through vetting or move high-volume traffic to a toll-free number or short code.

How long does it take to get a 10DLC trust score?

Standard third-party vetting usually returns a score within one to three business days after brand registration, sometimes the same day. Appeals and secondary vetting take a similar amount of time once the supporting documents are submitted.