WhatsApp Quality Rating
The WhatsApp quality rating is Meta's assessment of every phone number that sends through the WhatsApp Business API. It is shown in three levels (green for high, yellow for medium, red for low) and is based on how recipients reacted to your messages over the past seven days. Since October 2025 a low rating no longer lowers your messaging limit, but you need high-quality messages to move up to the next limit.
What is the WhatsApp quality rating?
The WhatsApp quality rating is a traffic-light score that Meta assigns to every sender number on the WhatsApp Business API. You see the status in WhatsApp Manager: green (high), yellow (medium) or red (low).
The rating reflects how recipients respond to your messages. It looks at a rolling window of the past seven days, and the main signals are user feedback: how often people block your number, how often they report it as spam, and the reasons they give when they block you. Many blocks and reports pull the rating down. A high read rate is a good early sign that your messages are welcome, but blocks and reports are what move the score.
Each phone number has its own rating; it is not one score for your whole account. Meta also rates each message template separately, and a template with poor feedback can be paused or disabled. The rating is closely linked to WhatsApp messaging limits, though the link changed in October 2025: a falling rating no longer cuts your limit, and the old Flagged status no longer exists.
Why the quality rating matters
Your quality rating decides how quickly you can grow on WhatsApp. It is not a cosmetic number:
- Growing your limit: Meta only scales your messaging limit to the next tier if you send high-quality messages across all numbers and templates.
- Templates: templates that collect a lot of negative feedback can be paused or disabled, which stops campaigns that rely on them.
- Early warning: a drop from green to yellow tells you that your content or your audience is off before real damage is done. Repeated policy violations can still lead Meta to restrict an account.
The most effective lever is a clean opt-in: if you only message contacts who explicitly agreed, you collect very few blocks. Relevant, well-timed templates and an easy way to unsubscribe keep the read rate high and complaints low.
Practical example
A fashion retailer in Leeds sends a sale broadcast to 4,000 contacts. 1,200 of them come from an old competition with no clear opt-in. Within two days around 300 recipients block the number and 90 report it as spam. The quality rating drops from green to red, and Meta pauses the sale template. Automatic scaling to a higher messaging limit is off the table for now.
The following month, the retailer only messages customers who actively agreed at checkout, and sends weekly instead of daily. Blocks and reports fall close to zero and the read rate rises above 80%. Within about a week the rating is back to green, and the account qualifies for the next limit again.
Keeping an eye on quality with SendSeven
SendSeven is a Meta Business Partner and uses the official WhatsApp Cloud API. Each template in the platform shows Meta’s quality rating next to its status and category, so you spot a template that is losing quality early.
For larger campaigns, warm-up protection warns you when a big audience meets a new number with a low Meta limit and suggests splitting the send over several days. Incoming messages carry no Meta fee. Since 1 October 2026, Meta charges every outbound message, including service messages in the 24-hour window, at the utility rate of the recipient’s market; only the first 1,000 service messages per number per month carry no Meta fee. SendSeven charges its own fee on every outbound message.
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