Carrier Surcharge
Carriers charge per segment on top of your provider's price. Registration and clean segment discipline are the two levers that keep the line item small.
Every A2P segment delivered to a US handset carries a carrier pass-through fee in addition to your provider's send price. AT&T and T-Mobile publish per-class rate cards; Verizon and regional carriers apply their own.
The structure rewards registration: unregistered or low-trust traffic pays the highest surcharges, while registered 10DLC traffic in matching use cases pays standard rates. T-Mobile additionally levies one-time program fees (campaign activation) and penalties for violations like content mismatch (fines published in the $1,000-$10,000 class for severe categories).
For budgeting: a 100,000-segment monthly program at $0.003 average surcharge adds $300/month on top of provider fees — and doubles if sloppy encoding splits messages into extra segments.
Frequently asked questions
Related glossary terms
A message segment is the billing unit of SMS: 160 GSM-7 characters per single message, 153 per segment when concatenated, and only 70 (67 concatenated) when Unicode characters like emoji are present.
10DLC (10-Digit Long Code) is the US carrier-mandated framework for sending Application-to-Person SMS from local 10-digit numbers, requiring brand and campaign registration with The Campaign Registry.
Carrier filtering is the automated blocking or throttling of SMS that carriers judge unregistered, off-use-case, or spam-like — often without any error returned to the sender.