What Is 10DLC Compliance? Rules and Consent

Q: What is 10DLC compliance?

Being 10DLC compliant means two things at once: your sender is properly registered, and your messaging follows the consent rules that sit on top of registration. Registration is the carrier layer, your brand and each campaign are on file and approved. Consent is the legal layer, largely the TCPA in the US, which requires prior express written consent before marketing texts, a clear disclosure at the point of opt-in, working STOP handling, and records you can produce later. Passing registration does not make you compliant on its own. A registered brand sending unconsented marketing is still breaking the law and will still be filtered.

In practice, compliance rests on evidence. The question is never "did you mean well", it is "can you show, for this specific phone number, when and how consent was captured, and that STOP was honoured immediately". That means storing the timestamp, the source of the opt-in, the exact disclosure wording shown, and the full opt-out history for every contact.

Message content matters too. Carriers filter for prohibited categories regardless of registration, and every campaign should identify the sender, keep to the use case it was registered under, and honour HELP and STOP keywords. Sending marketing traffic through a campaign registered as transactional is a common and avoidable violation.

Key facts

Two layers: carrier registration (10DLC) and legal consent (TCPA). Both are required.
Prior express written consent is required before marketing texts, with a clear disclosure at opt-in.
STOP and HELP must be honoured automatically, and opt-outs must persist across channels.
Traffic must match the use case its campaign was registered under.
On SimplyRCS, STOP and HELP are handled above the AI layer, so they are always honoured, and consent records are retained with a full audit trail.

What is 10DLC compliance?

Related questions