How Much Does A2P 10DLC Registration Cost on Twilio?

A2P 10DLC registration is a mandatory requirement for any business sending application-to-person SMS through US long code numbers on Twilio. The compliance fees are recurring monthly charges, not one-time setup costs, and the total depends on how many distinct use cases you register as separate campaigns. Understanding the full cost structure before you file prevents budget surprises and helps you design your campaign architecture to minimise monthly compliance spend.

Brand Registration Cost

Brand registration with The Campaign Registry costs $4 per month per brand, billed through Twilio as an ongoing charge. Every business sending A2P SMS must register their brand before registering any campaigns, and this $4 fee applies regardless of whether you have one campaign or twenty. The brand registration process requires your business EIN, legal name, website, and industry vertical, and brands are reviewed and approved within 1 to 3 business days in most cases. Sole proprietors and very small businesses that do not have an EIN can file as a sole proprietor brand, but this category has lower throughput limits and less carrier trust than a standard business brand.

Campaign Registration Cost

Each individual use case you register as an A2P campaign costs $10 per month on Twilio, in addition to the $4 brand fee. A business with three SMS use cases, for example appointment reminders, customer support, and marketing promotions, needs three separate campaigns and pays $30 per month in campaign fees plus $4 in brand fees, totalling $34 per month before any per-message costs. Campaign registrations include a vetting review by the carriers, which typically adds 3 to 5 business days to the process. Low-volume mixed-use campaigns can sometimes combine multiple use cases under a single campaign registration if the carrier accepts the combined description, reducing monthly fees for businesses with overlapping use cases.

Per-Message Carrier Surcharges

On top of registration fees, all A2P 10DLC messages carry a per-message carrier surcharge of $0.003 per outbound segment, which is passed through to you by Twilio. This surcharge is applied by the major US carriers, including AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon, and is separate from Twilio's base SMS rate. For a business sending 100,000 outbound messages per month, the carrier surcharge alone adds $300 per month, which is on top of the $790 base SMS cost, representing a 38 percent increase in per-message cost. The surcharge applies to each segment individually, so messages that split across multiple segments pay the surcharge on each segment.

Total Monthly Compliance Cost

For a mid-sized business running two active SMS campaigns and sending 50,000 messages per month, the monthly A2P 10DLC cost breakdown is as follows: $4 brand fee, $20 in campaign fees, $395 in base SMS costs, and $150 in carrier surcharges, totalling $569 per month in SMS-related spend. The compliance fees represent about 4 percent of total SMS cost at this volume, making them a relatively minor component for high-volume senders but a more significant fixed overhead for businesses sending fewer than 10,000 messages per month where the $24 monthly compliance fee is a larger proportion of total spend. Businesses scaling SMS volume should budget the compliance fees as fixed regardless of send volume.

Conclusion

A2P 10DLC fees are unavoidable for US long code SMS on Twilio, but the campaign architecture you choose determines how much you pay in recurring monthly compliance costs. Book a free consultation with our team and we will design the most cost-efficient campaign registration structure for your use cases.