Verizon's 1 October Fee Rise, and Why Replies Now Cost You Money

What changes on 1 October#

Verizon's outbound pass-through fee on A2P SMS rises from $0.0045 to $0.005 per message on 1 October 2026, across 10DLC, toll-free and short code traffic.

Verizon's RCS rich message fee moves in the same step, $0.0045 to $0.005. RCS is not a way around the fee schedule; it is on it.

Inbound stays free on Verizon, and MMS stays at $0.007. The change first shows up on November invoices, covering October traffic.

• Source for the new rates: Telgorithm's notice of 13 August 2026 (telgorithm.com, read 24 Sep 2026), confirmed by Tychron's dated fee feed, which also records inbound at $0.00 and MMS unchanged (tychron.com/the-campaign-registry, read 24 Sep 2026).
• Second Verizon increase in five months. The first took outbound SMS to $0.0045 on 1 May 2026 and raised the short code migration fee from $150 to $500 (Telgorithm, 24 Mar 2026).
• The arithmetic Telgorithm publishes: $0.0005 more per message, or about $500 extra for every 1 million messages delivered to Verizon subscribers.
• Six small US networks follow on 1 November, moving outbound 10DLC SMS to $0.005, including Voxtelesys, Appalachian Wireless and Thumb Cellular (Tychron, read 24 Sep 2026).

The 2026 fee schedule now charges for replies#

Carrier fees were mostly an outbound cost. AT&T began billing inbound 10DLC SMS in October 2024, and T-Mobile joined on 19 January 2026.

T-Mobile now charges $0.0025 on every inbound 10DLC and toll-free SMS. AT&T bills $0.0035 in both directions since 1 April 2026.

Read that from the seat of a sales team. The number you work hardest to raise, your reply rate, is now a line item on two of the three national carriers.

• Long code rates as published on twilio.com/en-us/sms/pricing/us, read 24 Sep 2026. Twilio has not yet posted the 1 October Verizon figure; the $0.005 comes from the carrier notices above.
• AT&T's April change added $0.0005 per SMS (about 16.7 percent) and $0.0015 per MMS (20 percent), applied to both directions (Telgorithm, 6 Feb 2026).
• All of these sit on top of the provider's own price per segment. On Twilio that is $0.0083 each way on a long code (read 24 Sep 2026).

RCS added a second meter: the 24-hour session#

RCS business messaging now has two ways to bill the same thread. Per message, like SMS, or per conversation, called Conversational RCS.

A session opens once a thread holds at least four rich messages, with at least one sent by the business and at least two genuine replies from the person.

From there, one carrier fee and one provider fee cover every message in the next 24 hours. Miss the trigger and you pay per message instead.

• Trigger rules as published by Telgorithm on 20 Aug 2026: four Rich or Rich Media messages, at least one outbound, at least two inbound, and the inbound must be real events such as text, a file, a quick reply or a shared location.
• Their own framing of who benefits, quoted: "nothing generates more back-and-forth than AI." The model is built for support bots and guided flows that run a dozen turns inside one day.
• Their example provider rates: $0.072 per session against $0.008 per outbound Rich Message, both before carrier fees (Telgorithm, 23 Sep 2026).

The session math, carrier by carrier#

Here is the part the explainers skip. On two carriers the session fee is more expensive than per-message billing for any conversation a sales rep actually has.

Take a four-message thread, two messages out and two replies in. On T-Mobile the per-message carrier fees come to $0.018. The session fee is $0.06, more than three times as much.

On Verizon the answer flips. Its session fee is $0.009, so from 1 October a four-message thread is already cheaper as a session.

• Carrier rates from telgorithm.com/carrier-fees, read 24 Sep 2026; AT&T and T-Mobile session fees dated 1 Sep 2026, Verizon 1 May 2026.
• Break-even assumes the thread alternates one message out and one reply in. On T-Mobile each pair costs $0.009, so the $0.06 session pays for itself only after about 6.7 pairs, roughly 13 messages.
• The provider layer tells the same story. At $0.072 a session against $0.008 per outbound message, Telgorithm's own rates break even at nine outbound messages in the window.

Two price sheets, two numbers for the same fee#

Pass-through is supposed to mean one number, set by the carrier, passed on untouched. The published sheets do not agree with each other.

Twilio lists T-Mobile's outbound RCS rich message fee at $0.0062. Telgorithm lists the same fee at $0.0065. Twilio bills AT&T RCS replies at $0.0045; Telgorithm lists no inbound fee at all.

Neither is necessarily wrong. Dates, message classes and rounding differ. But you cannot model a program off one blog table and expect your invoice to match.

• Twilio RCS carrier fees: AT&T $0.0045 out and $0.0045 in, T-Mobile $0.0062 out and $0.0025 in, Verizon $0.0045 out and $0 in (twilio.com/en-us/sms/pricing/us, read 24 Sep 2026).
• Telgorithm's own carrier table still lists AT&T 10DLC SMS at $0.0030 with a last-updated date of 1 Apr 2026, while its February notice put the new April rate at $0.0035 (telgorithm.com/carrier-fees, read 24 Sep 2026).
• The fix is boring and it works: pull last month's invoice, group the carrier fee lines by carrier and direction, and divide by message count. That is your real rate.

What 100,000 texts a month costs in carrier fees#

Put numbers on a mid-sized agency program: 100,000 outbound SMS a month, 30,000 replies, split evenly across AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon, the same split Telgorithm uses in its own models.

Outbound carrier fees come to $433.33 a month after 1 October, up from $416.67. Replies add $60, all of it on AT&T and T-Mobile. Carrier layer total: $493.33.

Now the admission. That carrier layer is smaller than two of our lines at $249 each. If someone tells you carrier fees alone will sink an SMS program at this size, they are overselling.

• Outbound: 33,333 messages each at $0.0035 (AT&T), $0.0045 (T-Mobile) and $0.005 (Verizon) is $116.67, $150.00 and $166.67.
• Replies: 10,000 each at $0.0035 (AT&T), $0.0025 (T-Mobile) and $0 (Verizon) is $35, $25 and $0.
• Provider layer on Twilio's published $0.0083 each way: 130,000 segments is $1,079 more, before 10DLC registration and the $10 monthly campaign fee (read 24 Sep 2026).
• The honest reading: the carrier fee is not the big cost. The meter is. Every reply your team earns makes the next bill bigger.

What this means if your number is reply rate#

Carrier fees on SMS price engagement. A campaign that doubles its reply rate doubles its inbound fees on AT&T and T-Mobile, and a long qualifying thread costs more than a short dead one.

Session billing does not fix that for sales. If your threads are short, or stretch across days as prospects reply between meetings, the session model costs more on T-Mobile and AT&T, not less.

iMessage does not ride carrier SMS rails, so none of these tables apply to it. Blue Reacher prices per line: $249 a month, $199 at 4+ lines, with no per-message fees and replies never metered.

• Pacing is the published limit instead of a meter: unlimited iMessages, with new conversations paced at 50 opted-in or 30 cold per line per day so lines stay deliverable.
• No A2P registration required, which also means no campaign vetting fee, no $10 monthly campaign fee and no brand registration.
• Consent law does not change with the channel. TCPA, opt-outs and quiet hours apply to iMessage exactly as they apply to SMS.
• We sell the flat model, so we gain when carrier fees rise. Every figure above is dated and sourced so you can check it without taking our word.

A ten-minute check on your own bill#

Most teams have never split their texting invoice into provider cost and carrier cost. Do it once before the October bill lands in November.

Five questions cover it, and each one has a yes or no answer on the invoice you already have.

• Does your invoice show carrier fees as their own line, or folded into one per-message price?
• What share of last month's fees came from inbound messages? That share rises with every campaign that works.
• Is any of your traffic RCS, and if so, is it billed per message or per session?
• How many messages does your average booked conversation take, and does it finish inside 24 hours?
• When did your provider last change its published carrier fee table, and does it match the carrier notices dated in this post?

Frequently asked questions