WhatsApp quality rating and messaging limits, explained
In short
WhatsApp rates your messages by how people receive them: blocks, reports and templates nobody reads lower the rating. Each template gets its own rating — high, medium or low — and a template that reaches low is paused for 3 hours, then 6 hours, and disabled the third time. Your messaging limit is how many different people your business can message outside the 24-hour window in a rolling 24 hours: 250 at the start, 2,000 once the business is verified, then 10,000, 100,000 and unlimited. It rises one step within six hours when your quality is high and you have used at least half of it in the last seven days.
Checked
WhatsApp does not ask whether your message is good. It watches what people do when it arrives, and that decides how much more you are allowed to send.
What quality means
Quality is a reading of how people respond to your messages. The signals Meta names are negative feedback — people blocking you or reporting you — and low read rates: templates that arrive and are never opened.
Nothing about your writing, your design or your offer is judged directly. A beautifully written message sent to people who did not expect it has low quality. A plain one sent to people who asked for it has high quality.
The rating on each template
Every approved template carries its own rating, shown in WhatsApp Manager:
- Quality pending — new, and not enough people have received it yet.
- High quality — little or no negative feedback.
- Medium quality — feedback from several people, or low read rates. Still sendable, and close to trouble.
- Low quality — the same signals, more of them. Still sendable, for now.
A template that keeps falling is paused: for 3 hours the first time, 6 hours the second. The third time it is disabled, permanently. A paused template cannot be sent — every message using it fails with error 132015, and a disabled one with 132016 — but the attempts are not charged and do not count against your limit.
A paused template does not, by itself, stop the number sending other templates. A business whose templates keep reaching low quality eventually finds that it does.
What to do when a template’s rating drops: stop sending it to cold lists, and look at who received it. Editing a paused template sends it back to review; a disabled one has to be replaced with new words.
The messaging limit
The messaging limit is how many different people your business can message outside a 24-hour customer service window, in any rolling 24 hours. Replies to people who wrote to you in the last day do not count. The same person messaged twice counts once.
The steps are 250, 2,000, 10,000, 100,000 and unlimited, and the limit belongs to your business portfolio — every number in it shares one limit. A second number does not double it.
From 250 to 2,000
Every new business starts at 250. There are three ways up:
- Verify your business with Meta, in Business Settings.
- Have the provider that connected you verify it, where they offer that.
- Send 2,000 delivered template messages to different people within 30 days, with high-quality templates.
Meta then looks at the quality of what you have sent. Approved, the limit becomes 2,000 straight away. If not, it stays at 250 and Meta tells you why and what to do next.
From 2,000 upward
From 2,000 the limit rises one step at a time, within six hours, whenever two things are true:
- your messages and templates are being received well, and
- you have used at least half of your current limit in the last seven days.
So the limit grows by being used. A business that sends 400 people a week will sit at 2,000 indefinitely, and that is fine — it is a ceiling, not a target.
Does low quality lower the limit?
Meta’s current documentation describes quality as the condition for the limit going up, and no longer describes it going down because quality fell. That does not make a low rating harmless:
- templates pause, and then disable;
- error 131048 restricts sending from a number whose recent messages were blocked or reported;
- enough negative feedback leads to enforcement — blocks on sending, and in the end the account. What happens then.
What keeps quality high
- Send only to people who agreed to hear from you, and record where and when. What counts.
- Honour stop requests immediately, including a “STOP” typed as a message.
- Start a new template with your most recent customers, the people most likely to open it, before the whole list.
- Send what was promised. Somebody who signed up for order updates and gets a sale every week blocks you.
- Fewer, better broadcasts. A message a week that people open beats a message a day that they mute.
- Remove numbers that are not on WhatsApp, so every report shows the problems that are real.
