What's 10DLC?

What it is, and why it exists

10DLC stands for "10-Digit Long Code" — the regular phone numbers businesses use to text customers (as opposed to short codes like 22000). Since 2021, the three big US carriers — Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T — require every business that wants to text consumers from a long-code number to register through a body called The Campaign Registry (TCR).

Why? Spam and scam texts got bad enough that carriers had to push back. The deal is: if you want your texts delivered reliably (and not silently filtered out), you tell carriers who you are, what you'll send, and how consumers consent. Carriers vet your submission, assign you a trust score, and decide how many messages per second they'll let you push through.

How carriers decide

Two registrations: a brand (your business — name, address, EIN, vertical) and one or more campaigns (specific texting programs — what you'll send, who consents, how often). Approvals usually take 1-2 days for the brand, 3-5 days for each campaign.

Carriers look at a fixed set of things, mostly on your public website:

• A privacy policy at a public URL that names SMS as a channel and describes opt-in/opt-out.
• A terms of service at a public URL.
• A sign-up form with a visible, unchecked-by-default consent checkbox, with disclosure text adjacent that names your brand, mentions message frequency and carrier charges, and references the STOP and HELP keywords.
• Sample messages that include your brand name and the STOP keyword.
• A campaign description specific enough that a reviewer can tell what you actually send.

Reject reasons cluster around vague campaign descriptions, missing privacy-policy SMS sections, sign-up forms without a consent checkbox, and sample messages that don't name the brand. We check all of these.