The 10DLC Daily Message Cap: Why T-Mobile Stopped Your Texts

Your texts were going out fine, then suddenly every message to some customers started failing with "Daily Message Cap Reached" (Twilio error 30023). Nothing is wrong with your number. You have hit T-Mobile's daily limit for business texting. Here is what the cap is, how big yours is, why it caught you, and how to plan around it.

What the daily cap is

When you register for A2P 10DLC, your business (the Brand) is given a trust score. T-Mobile then caps how many text segments, plus picture messages, that brand can send to T-Mobile subscribers each day. Texts to AT&T or Verizon customers do not count towards it, which is why some of your texts go through while others fail.

How big is your cap?

You can see your brand's trust score in your carrier's A2P registration screens. Twilio publishes the full tier table in its help article on T-Mobile daily message limits. The cap counts segments, not messages: a long text split into three segments uses three.

The rules people miss

• It is shared across your tax ID. Every brand registered under the same EIN draws from the same daily total. Two businesses under one EIN share one cap.
• It resets at midnight Pacific, not at midnight where you are. On the East Coast that is 3am.
• Only T-Mobile customers are capped. If roughly a third of your customers are on T-Mobile, a third of your texts fail once you hit it.
• Trust scores do not improve on their own. A low score usually comes from details that do not match your official business records.
• The very top tier can be lifted only through a special review with T-Mobile, which most small businesses never need.

What affects your trust score

Your trust score comes from the carriers' vetting of your brand when you register. In practice it depends on whether the details you submit match official records:

• Your legal business name, exactly as registered with the IRS, not a trading name.
• Your EIN, matching that legal name.
• Your business address, matching the one on your official registration.
• A working website and contact details that show a real business.
• Your business type, chosen correctly (for example, private company, non-profit).

A mismatch in any of these is the most common reason for a low score. Because scores do not change by themselves, fixing the details and asking your carrier about re-vetting is the way to move up a tier.

A worked example

Imagine a sole proprietor, so a 1,000-a-day T-Mobile limit, with 3,000 contacts, about a third of them on T-Mobile. She sends one long announcement of 200 characters, which is two segments each.

• Each T-Mobile text uses 2 segments, so the cap covers about 500 T-Mobile customers.
• The other 500 or so T-Mobile customers get error 30023 for the rest of the day.
• Everyone on other carriers receives it normally.

Shortening the message to one segment would have doubled how many T-Mobile customers it reached. Spreading it over two days would have reached them all, though the better question is whether a message to all 3,000 contacts was a good idea at all.

Why it usually catches small businesses

Most small businesses never come close to a cap during normal one-to-one texting. They hit it on the day they try to text everyone at once: an announcement, a promotion, or an imported list. A sole proprietor with 3,000 contacts who sends one message to all of them reaches the T-Mobile limit after about a thousand T-Mobile customers, and the rest fail for the day.

Big sends cause a second problem too. A sudden spike from a quiet number, followed by a wave of STOP replies, looks like spam to carriers. That can lead to filtering long after the cap has reset. It is one reason TelBuddy deliberately has no "blast" button: one-to-one conversations stay far below the cap and look exactly like the traffic registration is designed for.

How to plan around it

1. Know your number. Find your trust score and its daily limit, and remember it is shared across your EIN.
2. Keep texts to one segment. Under 160 plain characters (70 with emoji) halves the cap you burn on long messages.
3. Spread large sends over days, if you must send them at all, and only to people who opted in.
4. Fix a low trust score. Make sure your registered business name, address and EIN match your official records exactly, then ask your carrier about re-vetting.
5. Do not register as a sole proprietor if you have an EIN. A standard brand usually gets a higher cap. See sole proprietor registration without an EIN.

If you have already hit it

• Stop sending the batch. Every further text to a T-Mobile customer fails until the reset.
• Note who did not get it. Failed messages show error 30023. Resend to those people after midnight Pacific, ideally spread out.
• Call or email anyone urgent. The cap only affects texts.
• Watch your STOP replies over the next day. A spike means the message was unwelcome, whatever the cap.

How TelBuddy handles it

TelBuddy runs on your own Twilio or Telnyx account, so the cap belongs to your brand and your carrier. When a text hits it, TelBuddy says so in plain English, "Your 10DLC daily limit (T-Mobile) is used up. It resets at midnight Pacific", instead of a bare error code, both when you press send and on the message's delivery result. And because TelBuddy is built for one-to-one conversations, with no blast button, normal use stays far below any cap.

For every other delivery error, see why business texts are not delivered, and for the registration itself, A2P 10DLC explained.