10DLC Brands & Campaigns

10DLC Brands & Campaigns

10DLC (“10-Digit Long Code”) is the carrier framework that governs application-to-person (A2P) SMS sent from ordinary local phone numbers to US and Canadian subscribers. Carriers require every business sender to register its identity and messaging use case with The Campaign Registry (TCR). Registered traffic gets reliable delivery and meaningful throughput; unregistered traffic is heavily filtered or blocked outright.

Registration happens in two steps, both managed from the 10DLC tab on Account → Phone Numbers:

1. Brand — who you are. Your organization’s verified legal identity.
2. Campaign — what you send. A declared messaging use case under a verified brand, to which you bind your phone numbers.

You need one verified brand per legal entity, and at least one approved campaign before any local number can send A2P SMS at volume.

Not needed for Canada-only organizations

10DLC registration is keyed on US-bound destinations, not on the organization. If every number your organization owns is a Canadian number (and you have no recent US-bound sends), you do not need 10DLC registration — the getting-started checklist shows the brand, campaign, and number-assignment steps as not applicable. The exemption covers SMS only: US voice DIDs do not count, and any US-bound send from such an organization is still blocked at send time with an in-product explanation.

Brands

A brand is your organization’s registration with TCR. Open the 10DLC tab and click Register Brand, or click an existing brand to open the editor.

Brand statuses

Status	Meaning	Typical duration
draft	Saved on your account only; fully editable, nothing sent to TCR, no fee.	Until you submit
pending	Submitted — TCR and carriers are vetting your identity. You may receive a 2FA verification code at the registered phone or email.	Hours to a few business days
verified	Identity confirmed. You can now create campaigns under this brand.	—
unverified	Registered, but the registry could not automatically confirm your identity — almost always a mismatch between the legal company name and the tax / business number. Check both match your government registration exactly (including “Inc.” or “Ltd.”), then use Request enhanced vetting on the brand editor, a one-time paid review. If the details are wrong, contact support to correct them.	Request enhanced vetting
failed	The submission was refused. If nothing was created at the registry, the brand unlocks so you can fix it and resubmit (see below); otherwise it stays locked and support corrects it.	Fix and resubmit, or contact support

Once submitted, brand fields are locked — carriers vet the exact record submitted, so if your details change later (legal name, address), contact support to re-vet.

Being re-checked. When a correction to a brand’s legal name or tax / business number reaches the registry while the brand is not verified, the brand shows Being re-checked instead of Not verified: the registry is running its identity check again, which usually takes hours to a few business days. We’ll email you when it’s done, the same status notification as any other outcome. The brand page also shows when it was last synced from the registry: SIPSTACK re-reads every registered brand and campaign at least once a day, so a change made directly with the registry shows up here too.

The exception is a submission the registry refused outright. If the registry declined your brand without creating anything on its side — a missing or invalid field, for example — the brand unlocks so you can correct it and submit again yourself, no support ticket needed. The editor tells you when this applies. A brand that was actually registered and then failed vetting stays locked, because a second submission would create a duplicate registration and incur a second fee.

Submitting a brand carries a one-time registration fee, collected from your account’s payment method before anything is sent to the registry. If it can’t be collected, nothing is submitted; if the registry rejects the submission, you get the money back. On most accounts that means a real charge followed by a refund, both visible on your statement. Accounts whose default card has already paid an invoice or a subscription renewal get a temporary authorization instead, released rather than refunded — no charge ever appears. The two produce different notifications; see Refunds and released holds.

Brand fields

Field	Guidance
Entity type	Match your incorporation reality: Private For-Profit, Public For-Profit, Non-Profit, or Government. Public For-Profit brands additionally require Auth+ enhanced vetting (stock-symbol verification). Sole proprietorships cannot be registered — the messaging registry stopped accepting them on 1 November 2022, so the option is not offered. Register the business under the entity type it is actually constituted as; for most small businesses that is Private For-Profit.
Legal company name	Exactly as registered with the CRA (Canada) or IRS (US), including Inc., Ltd., LLC or Corp. This is checked against your tax / business number, and a mismatch is the #1 cause of failed vetting. In the US it is the name on your EIN confirmation letter from the IRS; in Canada, the name the CRA holds for your business number (on your BN confirmation letter or in your CRA business account). Not your brand name — that goes in Display name.
Display name (DBA)	The name customers know you by. It can differ from your legal name. Used in carrier registries and complaint workflows.
Tax ID / EIN	Required for every entity type before you can submit the brand for vetting — the registry asks for it on every brand it will accept. You can still save a draft without one. US: 9-digit EIN (12-3456789). Canada: 9-digit business number (123456789), optionally with a program suffix (123456789RC0001).
Registered address	Your legal registered address — street, city, state/province, postal code.
Country	US or CA only. 10DLC governs traffic into US/CA networks.
Support email / phone	A reachable contact. Carriers may use it during vetting, and 2FA codes are delivered here.
Website	Optional but recommended — reviewers use it to corroborate identity.
Industry vertical	Required. Carriers refuse a brand with no vertical. The submission fee is charged before the carrier responds, so submitting without one costs the fee for a registration that cannot succeed — the form therefore blocks it.

Legal-name warnings and the check before you pay

The brand editor shows a warning under Legal company name when:

• the entity type is Private For-Profit or Public For-Profit and the name has no corporate ending (Inc., Ltd., LLC, Corp., Limited, Ltée, S.E.N.C. and so on), or
• the legal name is the same as the display name.

These are warnings only. They never stop you saving or submitting, because some registered names legitimately have no ending, and some businesses trade under their registered name. They are there because a brand name typed into the legal-name box is the most common reason a brand comes back unverified.

When you click Submit for vetting, the confirmation shows your legal name, tax ID / business number and country side by side with the fee. These must match your government registration exactly, or the registry will mark the brand Unverified and the registration fee is not refunded. Only a submission the registry refuses outright (nothing created on its side) is refunded. Tick I confirmed these match my registration to enable the pay button.

Auth+ verification and 2FA

Two extra controls appear on the brand editor depending on status:

• Request enhanced vetting — shown on any brand that has reached the registry and has no vetting run in progress or already passed, including unverified brands, which is what it is for. Auth+ is mandatory for Public For-Profit entities and can raise throughput tiers for others. It carries its own one-time vetting fee, billed the same way as submission.
• Resend 2FA code — shown while a brand is pending, for when the carrier’s verification code never arrived at the registered phone/email.

Campaigns

A campaign declares a messaging use case under a verified brand. Carriers review it, approve it, assign throughput, and from then on every number bound to it sends under that registration.

Campaign statuses

Status	Meaning	Typical duration
draft	Saved on your account only; editable, no fee.	Until you submit
pending	Under TCR/carrier review.	1–5 business days
approved	Live. Fields are read-only; the phone-number binding panel appears.	—
rejected	Declined by reviewers — the rejection reason is shown in the editor.	Fix in a new draft and resubmit
suspended / deactivated	Stopped by a carrier or by you. Messages from bound numbers will be filtered.	—

Campaign submission carries a one-time registration fee plus a recurring monthly carrier fee.

Campaign fields

Field	Guidance
Brand	The verified brand this campaign belongs to. Fixed after creation.
Use case	The closest match: Customer Care, Marketing, Account Notifications, 2FA, Delivery Notifications, etc. Mixed/Low-Volume use cases approve slower and receive lower throughput.
Campaign name	Internal label; appears in registry records.
Description	Concretely state who receives messages and why. “Appointment reminders and support replies to Acme customers” approves; “notifications” gets rejected.
Opt-in / message flow	The field reviewers read hardest. Describe exactly how a subscriber consents (e.g. “customers opt in at checkout or by texting JOIN”) and how they leave (STOP).
HELP reply / OPT-OUT confirmation	Pre-filled with compliant defaults; keep your brand name in them.
Sample messages	At least one realistic example of what you’ll send, including your brand name. Marketing samples missing “Reply STOP to opt out” are a classic rejection.

What happens when a campaign is rejected

The editor shows the reviewer’s rejection reason in a banner. The monthly fee is not charged for rejected campaigns.

If the registry refused the submission without creating anything on its side, the campaign unlocks and you can correct it in place and submit again. Otherwise — including a campaign that was registered and then rejected on review — create a new draft addressing the reason (usually consent language in the message flow or unrealistic samples) and submit that.

Binding phone numbers

On an approved campaign, the Phone numbers bound to this campaign panel lists every number carrying the registration:

• Click Add number and pick any SMS-capable number on your account to bind it. Outbound SMS from that number then presents this campaign’s use case to carriers.
• Unbind with the × button. A number can belong to one campaign at a time.
• Numbers registered through legacy Flare messaging show a Flare badge and are managed by support.

Throughput

After approval, carriers assign per-campaign throughput shown in the campaign editor’s status banner:

• Standard MPS — messages per second across AT&T-style carriers.
• 10DLC MPS / daily caps — T-Mobile uses brand-level daily message caps instead of a pure rate.

Throughput is determined by your brand’s vetting score, entity type, and use case — not by how many numbers you bind. If you need more headroom, Auth+ vetting on the brand is usually the lever. Until carriers report tiers, the banner shows “assigned by carriers, not yet reported”.

Submission failures

What you see depends on when the submission was refused.

Refused before the charge. Details are validated before anything is sent to the registry, so a submission with missing or invalid fields is refused with an error naming each one — nothing is charged and the draft stays editable. A brand submission is refused the same way, before the charge, while SIPSTACK’s registry account is not configured to accept new registrations: the error states that no fee was charged and your details are unchanged. Retrying will not succeed until it is fixed — open a support request.

Refused by the registry after the charge. When the registry declines a submission outright and creates nothing on its side, the submission response now carries the registry’s reason for the refusal instead of a generic server error, and the fee is returned: a charge plus refund on most accounts, or a released hold on accounts with payment history (see Refunds and released holds). The reason is also shown in the editor, and the brand or campaign unlocks so you can correct the details and submit again yourself.

Status notifications

Registering for 10DLC takes three steps, and you can’t send texts until all three are done:

1. Brand — verify who you are.
2. Campaign — say what you’ll send. Review usually takes 1–5 business days.
3. Attach your number to the approved campaign.

A verified brand on its own doesn’t let you send. When a step reaches a new outcome, your organization’s owners and anyone with permission to manage 10DLC registrations get a notification in Switchboard and, by default, an email. Every notice shows the three steps with the one you’re on marked, says plainly whether you can send yet, gives the reviewer’s reason when one was recorded, and links to the page where you take the next step.

Outcome	Where you are	What to do next
Brand verified	Step 1 of 3 done	Create a campaign under the brand.
Brand not verified	Step 1 of 3: brand needs attention	Check that the legal name and tax number match your registration exactly (Inc., Ltd.). If they do, request enhanced vetting, which has its own fee. If a detail is wrong, contact support.
Brand not accepted	Step 1 of 3: brand needs attention	Read the reason. If the brand unlocked, correct it and submit again; otherwise contact support.
Campaign approved	Step 2 of 3 done	Attach your number to the campaign. This is sent once carriers can actually carry the campaign, which can be a little after it first shows as approved.
Campaign rejected	Step 2 of 3: campaign needs attention	Read the reviewer’s reason and fix it in a new draft, or in place if the campaign unlocked.
Campaign suspended or no longer active	Step 2 of 3: campaign needs attention	Messages from attached numbers will be filtered. Contact support.
Number ready to send	All 3 steps done	Nothing. Your number can send texts now.

The Number ready to send notice names the number or numbers that went live. Attaching a number is processed in the background, so this notice arrives once the attachment is confirmed, typically within about an hour of Add number, not the moment you click it. If the attachment fails, the number shows as failed on the campaign instead.

You get one notice per change; nothing is sent while a registration is still in review, and checking the status again does not send it twice. Each person can turn the email off under their notification preferences (10DLC registration status change), in Switchboard and in Pulse. That setting appears only for people who receive the notice.

Timeline at a glance

1. Register brand (draft → submit, one-time fee) — verified in hours to days.
2. Optionally complete Auth+ vetting (required for Public For-Profit).
3. Create campaign under the verified brand (draft → submit, one-time + monthly fee) — approved in 1–5 business days.
4. Bind your SMS-capable numbers to the approved campaign.
5. Send. Throughput tiers appear on the campaign once carriers report them.