Capacity, Quality Rating, and Messaging Limits
Capacity Rate Limits
Capacity rate limiting is imposed on each available API endpoint and will return the appropriate HTTPS error codes (e.g., 429, 503, etc.) depending on the state of the system.
Two forms of capacity rate limiting are currently supported:
Request rate limiting: Request rate limiting is the throttling of incoming requests on an API endpoint. When the number of requests per second limit is reached, the endpoint will start returning a
429error code.Concurrent rate limiting: Concurrent rate limiting is the throttling of incoming requests when the Coreapp itself is under heavy load (e.g., job queue size grew too large). At this point, the endpoint will start returning a
503error.
When you hit either of these capacity rate limiting scenarios, you should halt any further requests and slow the pace of your API requests. If you start seeing many capacity rate limit errors, it would be advisable to build a queue on your end to throttle the requests.
Messaging Limits
Messaging limits define how many unique WhatsApp users a business can message outside the customer service window within a rolling 24-hour period.
Unlike older rules that applied limits per phone number, messaging limits are calculated at the business portfolio level. All phone numbers within the same portfolio share a single messaging capacity. This means one number can consume the full limit if usage isn't managed carefully.
Default Limit
New business portfolios start with a limit of 250 unique messages in a 24-hour rolling period.
This limit can grow to:
How to Increase Messaging Limits
Limit increases happen in two stages:
1. Scaling to 2,000
A portfolio can reach the 2,000 tier by completing any of the following paths:
Sending 2,000 delivered messages (outside the service window) to unique users within a 30-day rolling period, using high-quality templates
Once one of these paths is completed, Meta reviews message quality and determines eligibility for the upgrade.
The limit increases immediately to 2,000
The limit remains unchanged
A notification is sent via email and developer alerts
A notification is sent with guidance on next actions
A business_capability_update webhook reflects the new maximum limit
(payload fields vary depending on API version)
Businesses may be prompted to:
Verify identity
Improve quality signals
Send additional qualifying messages
Automatic Scaling Beyond 2,000
After reaching 2,000, further increases can occur automatically if both criteria are met:
High message quality across all phone numbers and templates
At least 50% of the current portfolio limit used within the last 7 days
When eligible, the limit moves to the next tier within 6 hours.
Quality Rating
Maintaining high message quality is essential, as poor user feedback may affect eligibility for future upgrades.
Best practices include:
Messaging only users who have opted in
Using relevant and personalized content
Managing frequency thoughtfully
Monitoring blocks, reports, and delivery performance
What Defines Quality
Your quality rating is based on how messages have been received by recipients over the past seven days and is weighted by recency. It is determined by a combination of quality signals from conversations between businesses and users. Examples include user feedback signals like blocks, read rates, reports and the reasons users provide when they block a business.
A message template's Quality Rating can have the following status:
Active - Quality pending: The message template has yet to receive quality feedback from customers. Message templates with this status can be sent to customers and will be monitored for rating.
Active - High Quality: The template has received little or no negative customer feedback. Message templates with this status can be sent to customers.
Active - Medium Quality: The template has received negative feedback from multiple customers but may soon become paused or disabled. Message templates with this status can be sent to customers.
Active - Low Quality: The template has received negative feedback from multiple customers. Message templates with this status can be sent to customers but are in danger of being paused or disabled soon, so it is recommended that you address the issues that customers are reporting.
Approved message templates start out with a Quality pending rating. If a message template continuously receives negative feedback, it will eventually cause a change in the template status. As long as a message template has an Active status, regardless of the quality rating, it can be sent to customers. However, once a message template's status changes to any other status, it cannot be sent to customers until it becomes active again.
Maintaining High Quality
To help your clients create a quality customer experience, review these expectations and best practices with them and include them in your documentation:
Meta requires businesses to get opt-in from customers before initiating a conversation, which can be obtained both on and off WhatsApp
Make sure messages follow the WhatsApp Business Policy and Commerce Policy.
Only send messages to users who have opted into receiving messages from your business.
Make the messages highly personalized and useful to users. Avoid sending open-ended welcome or introductory messages.
Be mindful of messaging frequency; avoid sending customers too many messages a day. Be thoughtful of informational messages, optimizing for content and length.
Clearly communicate the value of receiving important updates on WhatsApp. Make the messages highly personalized and useful to users
Be explicit about what types of messages a customer is opting-in to and honor those customer choices
Regularly monitor your quality metrics. Be mindful of customer preferences and update communications strategy accordingly, such as message frequency, contacts list etc.
Provide instructions for how to opt-out of receiving specific messages. For example, include a ‘STOP’ or an ‘UNSUBSCRIBE’ button to make it easy for people to control the communication they receive. We’ve made this simple with the marketing opt-out button that businesses can add to their templates.
Honor customer requests by ensuring opted-out users don’t receive messages from any phone numbers from your business to mitigate risk of customers blocking or reporting your business
Meta constantly monitors user sentiment and feedback shared by the user. If a business’s phone number has a low quality rating for an extended period of time, the phone number is flagged and could be rate limited. If a message template a business sends results in a high enough rate of people blocking or reporting the business, the template will be paused from being sent to more customers until it is updated.
Please ensure your clients are aware of these quality systems and processes. As more businesses find value in connecting with people through messaging, Meta continue to refine their quality systems, build helpful user controls and introduce additional types of enforcement.
See more messaging best practices here.
Checking Messaging Limits and Quality Rating
It is important to build and maintain a high quality customer experience on WhatsApp, so that customers can keep using this channel to communicate with your business. To protect users, WhatsApp has a reporting and blocking mechanism. If a user doesn't like the experience they get, they might block or report your business number.
A block or report action against your business keeps you from contacting those users and impacts your phone number reach and the template availability.
To help you keep a high quality experience for your customers, we recommend that you monitor the quality signals to assess how messages are being received by users and act on relevant updates as quickly as possible.
The current portfolio limit appears under WhatsApp Manager → Account Tools → Messaging Limits
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