A2P 10DLC Registration for Solar Companies: The 2026 Guide

You bought a business texting number, loaded your canvass list, sent 300 texts about a free savings estimate, and almost nobody replied. It was not your pitch. Your messages never arrived. In 2026, US carriers block unregistered business texting, and solar is one of the verticals they watch hardest.

This guide walks a solar company through A2P 10DLC registration from zero: what it is in plain words, exactly what to submit, what it costs, the solar-specific reasons campaigns get rejected, and what throughput your trust score actually buys you. It is written for the owner or sales manager doing this themselves, not for a compliance attorney.

What A2P 10DLC actually is, in plain words

A2P stands for application-to-person: any text sent by software (a CRM, a follow-up tool, a Twilio script) rather than typed by a human on a handset. 10DLC means 10-digit long code, the normal local phone numbers businesses text from.

Around 2021, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon decided that businesses texting from local numbers had to identify themselves first. The Campaign Registry (TCR) is the central database where you do that. You register two things:

• A Brand: your legal company identity. EIN, legal name, address, website.
• A Campaign: what you text about, with real sample messages, your use case, and how people opted in.

Carriers score your brand, assign your campaign a throughput tier, and in exchange agree to deliver your traffic instead of filtering it. That is the whole deal. 10DLC is not a law, it is a carrier requirement, and it sits alongside (not instead of) the consent rules covered in our TCPA guide for solar sales reps and the state-by-state SMS rules hub.

Why solar texting specifically gets filtered

Carrier spam filters are trained on complaint data, and solar generates a lot of complaints. Years of aggressive lead-gen operators blasting "FREE SOLAR, NO COST TO YOU" texts taught carrier ML models to treat solar vocabulary as high-risk. That means a legitimate solar sales team doing honest follow-up inherits a rough neighborhood: unregistered solar traffic is filtered near-instantly, and even registered traffic gets extra content scrutiny. Registration is how you separate yourself from the spam operators the filters were built for.

Step 1: Register your brand ($4 one-time)

You register through your messaging provider (Twilio, Telnyx, Bandwidth, etc.), which passes the info to TCR. You will need:

1. Legal company name, exactly as it appears on your IRS records. "Sunrise Solar LLC," not "Sunrise Solar."
2. EIN. The number-one cause of brand failures is an EIN/legal-name mismatch. Pull your CP 575 letter and copy it character for character.
3. Business address, website, and vertical (select Energy or a close equivalent).
4. A contact email on your company domain. A Gmail address on a $2M solar company looks wrong to vetters.

The fee is $4, charged once. If you have no EIN (a 1099 rep operating personally), Sole Proprietor registration exists but is capped at very low volume and gets the worst filtering treatment. If you sell under a real entity, register the entity.

Step 2: Register your campaign (~$15 vetting + $1.50 to $12/month)

The campaign is where solar companies get rejected, so slow down here. You pick a use case, describe your message flow, and submit sample messages. Vetting costs approximately $15 one-time, and the monthly fee runs roughly $1.50 for low-volume mixed up to about $10 to $12 for marketing and mixed use cases.

Pick the right use case

Most solar teams should pick Mixed (marketing plus customer care) or Low Volume Mixed if they send under about 2,000 messages a day. Picking "Customer Care" to save a few dollars a month while your samples clearly show marketing is a fast rejection.

What to write in the campaign description

Describe your actual flow, specifically. A description that works:

Sunrise Solar sends appointment confirmations, follow-ups after in-person
consultations, savings-estimate delivery, and installation status updates
to homeowners who requested a solar quote via our website form or in
person from a company representative. Recipients opt in at the time of
the quote request. All messages identify Sunrise Solar and include
opt-out instructions.

Sample messages that get solar campaigns approved

Submit 2 to 5 samples that look exactly like what you send. Use bracketed placeholders and include opt-out language in at least one. These pass vetting:

Hi [FirstName], it's Jake with Sunrise Solar. Great talking today.
Here's the savings estimate for your home based on your last 12 months
of usage: [link]. Questions? Just reply. Reply STOP to opt out.

Sunrise Solar: Hi [FirstName], confirming your consultation on [Date]
at [Time] with [RepName]. Reply YES to confirm or R to reschedule.
Reply STOP to opt out.

Hi [FirstName], your permit was approved today. Install is scheduled
for [Date]. [RepName] at Sunrise Solar will text you the morning of.

Now the version that gets rejected, which is unfortunately what half the industry actually sends:

Hi! Your area qualifies for the FREE government solar program.
$0 down, NO COST installation! Click here to claim your spot: bit.ly/xyz

That one sample contains five rejection triggers: "FREE," a government-program implication, "$0 down / no cost" claims, "click here," and a public URL shortener.

Solar-specific gotchas that kill campaigns

• "Free solar" and "no cost" claims. Vetters treat these as deceptive marketing. Say "savings estimate" or "$0-down financing options," never "free."
• Lead-gen language. Third-party lead generation and affiliate marketing are prohibited 10DLC content categories. If your description sounds like you generate or resell solar leads rather than sell installs, you will be rejected. Describe yourself as the installer or dealer contacting your own prospects.
• Government or utility impersonation. Any sample implying you are the utility, or that the ITC is a government check, is an instant fail (and a TCPA lawsuit magnet on top).
• Purchased lists as your "opt-in." The campaign form asks how recipients consent. "We buy aged leads" is both a vetting fail and, as our solar TCPA guide covers, not legal consent anyway.
• Website mismatch. If your site has no visible SMS disclosure or privacy policy mentioning texting, add one before submitting.

What your trust score buys: throughput by tier

After brand registration, TCR assigns a trust score from 0 to 100. That score sets your daily and per-second sending capacity. T-Mobile publishes hard daily caps (messages per day toward T-Mobile subscribers); AT&T limits rate per minute by campaign class; Verizon does not publish per-tier caps but filters on reputation.

If your score lands lower than expected, optional third-party external vetting (roughly $40, one-time) can re-score the brand. For most solar companies the lower-mid tier is already more capacity than they use, so do not overpay to chase a number you do not need.

Opt-in and opt-out: what carriers expect to see

Your campaign must describe a real opt-in flow and your messages must honor opt-outs. In practice:

• Opt-in: collect consent at the point of contact. On a web form: an unticked checkbox with "I agree to receive text messages from Sunrise Solar about my quote. Msg & data rates may apply. Reply STOP to opt out." At the door: the rep confirms "I'll text you the estimate at this number, that ok?" and logs it.
• Opt-out: STOP, CANCEL, QUIT and similar must immediately suppress the number. Most providers handle the keyword automatically; your job is to never text that number again.

A compliance footer that satisfies vetters, used on the first message of a thread:

Sunrise Solar. Msg & data rates may apply. Msg frequency varies.
Reply HELP for help, STOP to opt out.

You do not need the full footer on every message, but the first message in a conversation and any campaign-style blast should carry opt-out language.

What happens if you skip registration

You do not get a warning letter. You get silence:

• Twilio error 30034: "message from an unregistered number." Since mid-2023, Twilio blocks unregistered US-bound 10DLC traffic at the API. Your message dies before it reaches a carrier, and you still burn the send attempt.
• Carrier filtering: traffic that does slip through on other providers gets filtered (error 30007 territory), and every filtered message damages the number's reputation further. Our Twilio deliverability guide covers diagnosing this in depth.
• Compounding damage: by the time you register, the number itself may carry a reputation you have to ramp out of slowly.

The math is simple. Registration costs about $20 up front and a few dollars a month. One filtered blast to 500 canvassed homeowners costs you the blast, the leads, and the number.

One more note: 10DLC works the same way in adjacent home-services verticals, so if you also run a roofing crew or a home security dealership, each brand registers once and each distinct messaging program gets its own campaign.

Or skip the paperwork entirely

FollowUp was built for exactly this rep. On the Autopilot tier, every account gets a dedicated 10DLC-registered business number with the brand and campaign registration already done, so your follow-up texts, savings estimates, and appointment confirmations go out on registered, carrier-trusted infrastructure from day one. No TCR forms, no vetting queue, no error 30034.

Frequently asked questions

Do solar companies need A2P 10DLC registration?

Yes. Any solar company sending business SMS to US numbers from a standard 10-digit local number must register its brand and campaign through The Campaign Registry (TCR). Unregistered solar traffic is filtered or blocked outright by AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon in 2026, and Twilio rejects it with error 30034 before it even reaches a carrier.

How much does 10DLC registration cost for a solar company?

Brand registration is a $4 one-time fee. Campaign registration adds a one-time vetting fee of approximately $15, plus a recurring monthly fee of roughly $1.50 to $12 depending on the use case you pick (low-volume mixed is cheapest, marketing costs the most). Carriers also add small per-message A2P surcharges, typically fractions of a cent per segment.

Why was my solar SMS campaign rejected?

The most common reasons: sample messages containing "free solar" or "no cost" claims, campaign descriptions that read like lead generation or affiliate marketing (both prohibited content categories), missing opt-in descriptions, sample messages without opt-out language, and mismatches between the brand's website and what the campaign says it sends. Fix the samples, resubmit, and expect another vetting pass.

How long does A2P 10DLC registration take for solar?

Brand registration with a valid EIN usually resolves in minutes to a few days. Campaign vetting typically takes a couple of days to a few weeks, longer if reviewers kick it back for content fixes. Budget two to four weeks end to end, and register before the install-season rush, not during it.

Can I text solar leads from my personal phone without 10DLC?

Person-to-person texting from your own handset is not A2P traffic, so 10DLC does not apply to a rep manually texting from their iPhone. The moment software sends through a carrier SMS API on your behalf, it is A2P and must be registered. Either way, TCPA consent rules still apply.