A2P 10DLC is the registration US carriers require before a business can send application-to-person text messages from a standard 10-digit number. You register a brand (your legal entity, verified against its EIN) and then a campaign (what you will send and how people opted in). Until both are approved, your texts are filtered or silently dropped.
Why does registration exist at all?
Carriers spent years unable to distinguish a plumber texting an appointment reminder from a spam operation cycling through numbers. Rather than judge messages, they now vet senders. Register the business and declare the use case, and your traffic gets throughput; skip it, and filtering treats you as unknown.
The consequence that catches businesses out is that failure is silent. Unregistered messages do not bounce back with an error the way an email does. Your dashboard can show "sent" while the customer's phone shows nothing. Businesses often discover the problem weeks later, from a customer who says they never got the confirmation.
What do you need before you start?
Assemble these first — a mismatch in any one of them is the most common cause of delay.
- Legal business name and EIN, exactly as they appear on the IRS notice. Not your trading name, not the version on your truck.
- Registered business address, matching the EIN record.
- Website with a reachable privacy policy that explicitly states you do not sell or share phone numbers collected for texting.
- A visible opt-in — the actual form or checkbox where customers agree to be texted, with the consent language shown on the page.
- Sample messages that look like what you will really send, including your business name and how to stop.
Reviews commonly run around ten to fifteen days end to end, and resubmissions typically carry a fee — so the cost of a sloppy first submission is measured in weeks, not dollars.
Why do campaigns get rejected?
In our own installs the rejection cause is nearly always the website, not the message content. Reviewers open your site and look for the opt-in and the privacy policy with their own eyes. If the privacy link 404s, if consent language sits only in a PDF, or if the form has no checkbox, the campaign is declined regardless of how clean the copy is.
| Rejection | What it actually means | The fix |
|---|---|---|
| Brand / EIN mismatch | Name or address differs from the IRS record | Copy the EIN notice character for character, including punctuation |
| No visible opt-in | Reviewer could not find where consent is given | Put a real checkbox on a public form, unchecked by default |
| Privacy policy missing or broken | Link 404s, or omits the no-sharing clause | Publish a reachable policy naming SMS explicitly |
| Sample messages too generic | Placeholders instead of real content | Send true samples with your business name and STOP wording |
| Use case mismatch | Samples do not match the declared campaign type | Re-declare the campaign to match what you actually send |
What does compliant texting look like afterwards?
Registration is permission to send, not a licence to ignore the rules. Keep four habits. Identify yourself in the first message of any conversation. Honour STOP immediately and permanently — carriers enforce this and repeat sends to an opted-out number put your registration at risk. Keep consent records, with a timestamp and the source of every opt-in. Stay inside the declared use case: a campaign registered for appointment reminders should not start sending promotions.
Watch for the silent failure. If a number is a landline or otherwise non-routable, texts to it fail permanently — stop sending and call instead. A retry loop against a landline burns your throughput and teaches you nothing.
Registration is part of every Never-Miss-A-Lead install, because a lead-response system that cannot text is not a lead-response system. The market-cost view is in what a speed-to-lead system costs.
Questions owners actually ask
What is A2P 10DLC?
Application-to-Person messaging over standard 10-digit long codes. US carriers require businesses to register their brand and their campaign before sending. Unregistered traffic is filtered or blocked.
Do I need to register if I only text a few customers?
Yes. The requirement applies to business messaging sent from an application, regardless of volume. Low volume does not exempt you; it just means you notice the filtering later.
How long does 10DLC registration take?
Reviews commonly run about ten to fifteen days end to end, and resubmissions usually carry a fee. Most of the delay comes from correctable website issues rather than the review itself.
Why was my 10DLC campaign rejected?
Most often the website — a missing or broken privacy policy, or no visible opt-in checkbox the reviewer can find. Other frequent causes are a brand name or address that does not match the EIN record, and sample messages containing placeholders.
What happens if I text without registering?
Messages are filtered or silently dropped. Your sending dashboard may still report success while nothing reaches the customer, which is why the problem is usually found late.
Read next: missed call text back · what the system costs.