Number quality and messaging limit
WhatsApp grades every business phone number on how people respond to its messages, and caps how many people that number can start a conversation with in a day. Meta sets both values, we read them back, and one gates the other: quality is what decides whether your cap ever rises.
Where to find them
Open the Numbers page and select a number. Its WhatsApp status section carries three cards:
- Quality rating: High, Medium, Low, or Not rated. Medium and Low are marked as a risk.
- Messaging limit: how many people the number can start a conversation with per 24 hours.
- Send rate: how many messages per second the number can send.
All three are a reading of what WhatsApp last reported rather than a live value. We re-read them roughly hourly, so a change at Meta can be up to an hour old here.
A number we operate on your behalf shows none of the three. They belong to the business portfolio that owns the number, and our shared numbers sit on our own portfolio, so these values become yours to watch once you connect a number of your own.
What the quality rating means
Quality measures what your recipients did about your messages over the past seven days, weighted toward the most recent, and every signal in it is feedback from them: blocks, reports, mutes, archives, and the reason a person picks when they block your number. Nothing about your sending performance enters into it. A delivered message does not raise the rating, volume does not raise it, and read rates feed a template's own rating rather than the number's.
Both APIs report the rating as a color and both dashboards spell it out. Meta's Graph API uppercases the value and reports an ungraded number as NA; our API lowercases it and reports unknown:
| API value | Dashboard label |
|---|---|
| green | High |
| yellow | Medium |
| red | Low |
| unknown | Not rated |
A new number is unrated until Meta has enough feedback to grade it. A number with heavy traffic can move between ratings inside minutes, so a bad campaign shows up quickly.
Reading a Medium or Low rating
The rating alone does not say what went wrong, and the Numbers page shows the current rating only. The diagnosis lives in WhatsApp Manager, on the Phone numbers tab: hovering a Medium or Low rating shows the block reasons behind it when Meta has them, and the icon in the Settings column opens the last 30 days, with the lowest score each day, so you can line a drop up against what you sent.
When someone blocks a business, WhatsApp asks them why, and they pick one of:
- No longer needed
- Didn't sign up
- Spam
- Offensive messages
- No reason
The mix is the actionable part. Sign-up complaints point at how the opt-in was collected, spam and no-longer-needed at frequency and relevance, and offensive at the content of a specific template.
What the rating costs you
Quality gates the ceilings rather than the individual send. A Low-rated number keeps sending, and what it loses is room to grow:
- Meta raises a messaging limit only for a portfolio sending high-quality messages across all of its numbers and templates.
- A number needs Medium or better before it is eligible for the higher send rate.
- Meta ties eligibility for further features to holding a High rating.
Each template language carries a rating of its own, reported the same way: green, yellow, red, or unknown. A red language is the leading indicator of a pause, and Meta pauses it for three hours, then six, then disables it. A paused template does not pull the number's rating down by itself, but a business that keeps sending low-quality templates eventually sees the number affected. Template guidelines covers what Meta allows in the content itself.
What the messaging limit means
The messaging limit is the maximum number of unique WhatsApp user phone numbers your business can deliver messages to, outside a customer service window, within a moving 24-hour period.
Three consequences follow from that definition:
- It counts people, not messages. Several template messages to the same person in the same 24 hours consume one unit of the limit.
- Replies do not count. Anything you send inside an open customer service window sits outside the limit entirely.
- It is shared. Meta calculates the limit for the whole business portfolio, and every business phone number in that portfolio draws on the same allowance. One number can consume all of it and leave the others with nothing.
A new business portfolio starts at 250. From there the ladder runs to 2,000, 10,000, 100,000, and unlimited.
How to raise your limit
The first step up is the only one you act on:
- Reach 2,000 by completing one of Meta's scaling paths: verify your business, have the solution partner who onboarded your business verify it for you, or deliver 2,000 messages outside customer service windows to unique recipients within a moving 30-day period using templates with a high quality rating.
- Wait for Meta's quality review. Completing a path makes Meta analyze your message quality and decide whether the portfolio is eligible for automatic scaling. An approval raises the limit to 2,000 straight away, and Meta notifies you by email and developer alert. A denial leaves the limit where it is, and the alert names the alternate path to try, usually the 2,000-delivered-messages route or identity verification.
- Let automatic scaling do the rest. Past 2,000, Meta raises the limit one level at a time with no request from you, as long as you keep sending high-quality messages across all of your numbers and templates and you have used at least half of your current limit in the last seven days. When both hold, the increase lands within six hours.
Meta announces both the approval and the denial by email and by a developer alert, and fires a webhook to whoever is subscribed on its platform. Our webhooks report messages rather than account changes, so watch for these in Meta Business Suite and in the mail Meta sends.
Keeping quality high
Meta publishes the practices that protect a number's rating:
- Follow the WhatsApp Business Messaging Policy.
- Message only people who have opted in to hearing from your business.
- Keep messages personalized and useful to the person receiving them.
- Avoid open-ended welcome or introductory messages.
- Avoid sending too many messages per day.
- Keep content and length tight.
The failure these prevent is a block, and a block is the heaviest signal Meta counts. A campaign that goes out to a list without consent can cost a rating that took weeks to earn.
Send rate
A registered business phone number sends up to 80 messages per second by default, which is the value the Send rate card shows. The figure covers inbound and outbound messages of every type.
Meta upgrades an eligible number to 1,000 messages per second automatically and at no cost. Eligibility needs all three of the following:
- The portfolio's messaging limit is unlimited.
- The number has messaged 100,000 or more unique recipients outside customer service windows within a moving 24-hour period.
- The number's quality rating is Medium or better.
The upgrade itself takes up to one minute, and the number cannot send during it.
Next steps
- WhatsApp business verification: the fastest path off the 250 limit
- The WhatsApp customer service window: which messages count against the limit and which do not
- WhatsApp template guidelines: keeping the templates you send out of trouble
- Meta's own reference: Messaging limits, Message quality, About your WhatsApp Business phone number's quality rating, Template quality rating, Template pausing, and Throughput