WhatsApp quality rating and messaging limits, in Meta's terms

Quality rating is Meta’s score for a business phone number, and Meta publishes what feeds it: how WhatsApp users received your messages over the past seven days, blocks and reports included. It is not a grade on your writing. And since October 7, 2025 a falling rating no longer pulls your messaging limit down. What Meta did not do in the same change is make the drop block growth instead: it removed this rating from the automatic scaling criteria altogether.

What the rating measures

Meta’s Service messages page, read by us on 19 September 2026, states the mechanism in two sentences:

WhatsApp determines message quality from how WhatsApp users have received your messages over the past seven days, weighted by recency. It bases this score on user feedback signals such as blocks, reports, mutes, archives, and reasons users provide when they block you.

Every input named there is an action the recipient took, not a judgement about grammar, tone or usefulness. Meta’s guidance underneath is about sending behaviour rather than prose: “Only send messages to WhatsApp users who have opted into receiving messages from your business” and “Avoid sending open-ended welcome or introductory messages.” It also warns that high-volume numbers “commonly experience quality changes within short intervals (even within minutes)”.

The tiers Meta publishes, and the one it does not

There are two quality ratings and they are not the same object: one per message template, one per business phone number. For templates, Meta defines every value the API returns:

API value	What Meta says it indicates
GREEN	“Indicates high quality. The template has received little to no negative feedback from WhatsApp users.”
YELLOW	“Indicates medium quality”, and the template “may soon become paused or disabled”
RED	“Indicates low quality”, and the template “is in danger of being paused or disabled soon”
UNKNOWN	“Indicates a quality score is still pending”, awaiting feedback or read-rate data

Meta attributes the middle two to one pair of inputs: “negative feedback from multiple WhatsApp users, or low read-rates”. WhatsApp Manager shows the four in words, mapped by Meta: “Active - High quality (equates to a GREEN quality score)”.

For the business phone number rating, the developer pages we read carry no equivalent table, only the field in passing. The Business phone numbers page returns a quality_rating of GREEN in one example and NA in another, and says a number’s status “reflects their quality rating and current messaging limit”. The clearest published anchor for the scale is the Throughput page, one of whose eligibility requirements is that a number “must have a quality_score of YELLOW”, which Meta glosses as “shown as a Medium quality rating” in WhatsApp Manager.

Meta’s Business Help Center article on this rating carries more, including the colour mapping, but it is rendered by script and returns an effectively empty document to a plain fetch, so we cannot save a copy and will not quote it. No page we could save names a block rate, a report count or a score at which the rating changes, and we will not supply one.

What the rating does to messaging limits

From the Messaging limits page:

Messaging limits are the maximum number of unique WhatsApp user phone numbers your business can deliver messages to, outside of a customer service window, within a moving 24-hour period.

The limit is not per number: “Messaging limits are calculated and set at the business portfolio level and are shared by all business phone numbers within a portfolio.” A new portfolio starts at 250, and Meta’s published ladder above it reads “2,000 (by completing a scaling path)”, “10,000 (via automatic scaling)”, “100,000 (via automatic scaling)” and “Unlimited (via automatic scaling)”.

Quality gates both steps of that ladder, though neither gate is written in terms of the number’s own rating. One of the three scaling paths to the first rung is volume conditioned on template quality: “Send 2,000 delivered messages outside of customer service windows to unique WhatsApp user phone numbers within a 30-day moving period, using templates with a high quality rating.” Above it movement is automatic on two criteria, the first of which is “You are sending high-quality messages across all of your business phone numbers and templates”, the second “In the last 7 days, your business has utilized at least half of your current messaging limit”.

Read the criteria column for what it stopped saying. Meta’s own before-and-after table lists “Your business phone number quality rating is Medium or High” as a scaling criterion on the retired side and does not carry it over to the current one, where the quality condition is about the messages rather than about the number. So Meta documents no rule by which a fall in this rating halts the ladder. It may be a consequence of the message-quality criterion, and that sentence is our inference rather than Meta’s claim.

What a downgrade is, and what it stopped being

The behaviour this rating used to have is the one Meta retired. Meta’s comparison table records the old behaviour: “If your business phone number quality rating has been set to Flagged for the last 7 days, we will decrease its limit by one level, immediately.” The column beside it calls that state “no longer possible”, and states the consequence:

If your business phone number quality rating drops, its messaging limit will not be downgraded.

Meta dates the switch: “Starting October 7, 2025, we will instead calculate and set messaging limits on a business portfolio basis, and all business phone numbers within each portfolio will share them.” That page now opens by recording that the changes “are now live”.

Enforcement can still take messages away, and Meta’s policy and spam enforcement page keeps the two apart: “This document does not include information on messaging limits based on quality rating.” It does record a route from feedback to enforcement: “We might also limit or offboard your business from WhatsApp if your account receives excessive negative feedback from users.”

What a business can actually see

The Service messages page says the WhatsApp Manager phone numbers panel “displays your business phone number’s status, quality rating” and its messaging limits. Through the API, the status is one field:

Business phone numbers have a status, which reflects their quality rating and current messaging limit.

The limit is another, and the field that used to carry it is gone: “The messaging_limit_tier field, which used to return a business phone number’s messaging limit, has been deprecated.” Use whatsapp_business_manager_messaging_limit.

What you do not get is a notification. The webhook named phone_number_quality_update sounds like the one that tells you the rating fell. Its own reference page says otherwise:

The phone_number_quality_update webhook notifies you of changes to a business phone number’s throughput level.

Its single listed trigger is “A business phone number’s throughput level changes.” Nothing in Meta’s current documentation fires when a phone number’s quality rating moves. You poll the field, or you look at the panel.

A reading of Meta’s inputs, not a claim of Meta’s

Every signal Meta names is something the recipient did: a block, a report, a mute, an archive, or the reason attached to a block. None is a likely response to an answer sent to a question the person asked a minute earlier, and all are plausible responses to a message that arrived unasked. A number used mainly for replies therefore sits differently against this scoring function than one used mainly for outbound sends.

That is our reading of the inputs Meta publishes, not something Meta says. Meta publishes no comparison of reply traffic against outbound traffic, no weighting for any individual signal, and no figure for how far either moves a score, and we have not measured one. One part of it is not an inference: the limit counts recipients reached “outside of a customer service window”, so a message sent inside an open window falls outside its scope. That allowance is Meta’s, on Meta’s platform, and quoting it is not an offer of ours.

The short version

Quality rating is a seven-day, recency-weighted read on how recipients reacted, shown as a colour in WhatsApp Manager and as one API field per number and per template. A low rating does not shrink the limit you have, and Meta no longer names it as a condition on growing one either: the criteria it publishes now are about the messages you send and how much of your limit you use. An enforcement system runs on the same feedback and can still take messages away. Meta publishes the inputs and the tier names, not the thresholds.

Google runs a comparable scheme for review replies, where the decision is readable through an API field rather than announced in the dashboard: that one is documented here.