A business that starts texting customers through ordinary software without registering first tends to discover the problem in the worst possible way: the platform reports every message as sent, and none of them arrive. Since February 2025, US carriers block application-to-person text traffic from unregistered numbers — and much of that blocking is silent. This is why any texting project we take on begins with registration, not code, and why we tell you that up front instead of promising a Monday launch on a Friday handshake.
Registration is a real process with a real clock
Business texting over regular ten-digit numbers runs through a system called A2P 10DLC, and every sender registers twice. First the brand: your legal business identity, verified against your EIN. Then the campaign: what you will send, with actual sample messages, and proof of how people opt in — for a missed-call text-back, the opt-in is the call itself, and the registration says so.
Brand approval usually clears in one to three business days. Campaign review was running closer to two weeks as of mid-2026 because of volume. That is the paperwork week — sometimes two — and no vendor controls it. A vendor who promises texting "live by Friday" either has not done this before or is planning to send unregistered traffic on your business's name. Neither is someone you want holding your phone number.
Silent filtering is worse than an error message
Unregistered or sloppily registered traffic does not always bounce. Carriers filter it quietly: the sending platform records a successful send, the message never reaches a phone, and no error comes back. A business can run this way for weeks — replying to missed calls, confirming appointments, following up on quotes — while every message evaporates in transit. The owner concludes texting doesn't work. The customers conclude the business ignored them.
Registration is what buys deliverability. That is the honest reframing of the paperwork: it is not bureaucracy standing between you and your customers. It is the difference between messages that arrive and messages that only appear to.
One line in the law decides almost everything
The Telephone Consumer Protection Act governs business texting, and the line that matters runs between two kinds of message. A text replying to someone who just called your business is responsive and expected — they reached out, you answered in another channel. That is the strongest consent posture available, and it is the posture a missed-call text-back lives in.
A promotional text is a different legal object entirely. "We're running a spring special" sent to your customer list is marketing, and marketing requires prior express written consent — a record showing this specific person agreed, in writing, to receive marketing texts from this specific business. Having their number because they hired you last year is not consent. This single distinction is the most important compliance fact in the whole product, and it is the one most vendors skip past.
The consent rules tightened in 2025 — and one piece is still coming
Most of the FCC's revised consent-revocation rules took effect in April 2025, and they broadened how customers can revoke consent — a revocation expressed in any reasonable way has to be honored, not just the exact keyword your software listens for. One remaining piece — a single STOP revoking consent for everything the business sends — has been delayed, currently to January 2027. The practical posture does not wait on the deadline: honor STOP instantly, across the board, from day one. The standing rules still apply alongside: STOP must work instantly and permanently, every message must identify the business by name, and texts stay inside quiet hours, 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. in the recipient's local time — the recipient's, which matters the moment you text a customer who moved two time zones away.
These are not burdens a well-built system struggles with. They are exactly the things software is good at: an unforgeable opt-out list, automatic quiet-hour holds, business identification templated into every message.
Penalties run per message, not per campaign
The TCPA sets statutory damages of five hundred dollars per violating message, and a court can triple that for willful or knowing violations. The recipient does not have to prove they lost a dime. The arithmetic is the point: one unlawful blast to a list of a thousand numbers is not one violation, it is a thousand, and TCPA claims aggregate readily into class actions. This is why, when a client asks us to text their full customer list about a promotion, the answer is: not from this system, and not until written consent is collected properly. A reactivation campaign is a fine idea. It starts with consent, not with a send button.
What the paperwork does not fix
Registration makes messages deliverable and consent handling makes them lawful. Neither makes the system succeed on its own. Some callers dial from landlines, which swallow texts silently — without a line-type lookup before sending, those leads vanish and everyone assumes they were covered. A caller who phones twice should not be texted twice, which takes deliberate deduplication. Spam dialers should not be texted at all.
The larger honesty: a text-back recovers enquiries, not guaranteed jobs. It converts a dead missed call into an open conversation; a person still has to answer that conversation, quote the work, and win it. And for a true emergency — water through a ceiling at 11 p.m. — a text alone is not an adequate response. The message has to offer an immediate path to a human, and the escalation behind it has to be real.
None of this page is legal advice — the dates and duties above are the published rules as best we read them, and your own counsel confirms how they apply to you.
Where to start
Find your EIN letter and check that the legal name on it matches the business name on your website and your invoices. Mismatches are the most common cause of registration delays, and fixing one costs nothing this week and two weeks of waiting later. If you want, send us the name exactly as the IRS has it, and we will tell you what else the registration will ask for before you commit to anything.