How many text messages are sent a day? Texting statistics for business

Americans send roughly 5.5 billion text messages a day. That figure comes from dividing CTIA's annual count of about 2 trillion SMS and MMS messages by 365. If you're asking how many text messages are sent a day worldwide, no primary source publishes an audited global SMS total, but chat apps push the number far higher: WhatsApp alone reported about 100 billion messages a day in 2020.

Most "SMS marketing statistics" pages repeat the same handful of numbers without saying where they came from. This roundup takes the opposite approach. Every figure below names its source and year. Where a widely quoted stat has no traceable origin, we say so. At the end, we turn the numbers into practical decisions for a business, or a platform texting on behalf of its customers, that is starting to send.

How many text messages are sent a day in the US?

The most reliable US number comes from CTIA, the wireless industry association. It publishes an annual survey of carrier data.

• 2020: about 2.2 trillion texts (SMS + MMS), per CTIA's 2021 Annual Wireless Industry Survey. That was a pandemic-year spike.
• 2021: about 2 trillion texts, per CTIA's 2022 survey.

Recent editions have stayed in the same 2-trillion neighborhood. Check ctia.org for the newest release before you quote a year.

The daily math

2,000,000,000,000 ÷ 365 ≈ 5.48 billion texts a day, or about 63,000 every second.

This is a derived average. CTIA does not publish a daily figure. Holidays, emergencies and big events produce much higher peaks.

What the CTIA number doesn't include

CTIA counts carrier SMS and MMS. It does not count iMessage, WhatsApp, Messenger or other app traffic. Those messages travel over data, not the carrier SMS network. When an iPhone texts another iPhone with iMessage on, that blue message never shows up in the 2 trillion.

Global texting volume: what's actually sourced

You'll see "23 billion texts a day worldwide" all over the web. We couldn't trace it to a primary dataset, so we don't use it. Here's what we could trace:

• WhatsApp: about 100 billion messages a day, as stated by WhatsApp and Meta in 2020.
• iMessage: Apple said at WWDC 2016 that iMessage traffic peaks at more than 200,000 messages per second. If you multiplied that peak across a full day you'd get about 17 billion, but that is a peak rate, not a daily average. Apple hasn't published a newer figure.

The takeaway for a business is that "texting" in a customer's mind means one inbox. SMS, MMS and iMessage all land in the same Messages app on a phone. People don't think about the protocol. They just see your message next to their friends' messages.

Phone ownership and texting habits

Volume only matters if the people you want to reach actually text. They do.

Two of these rows matter more than they first appear.

The FTC scam figure explains carrier filtering. Reported text-scam losses more than doubled from 2021 to 2022, per the same FTC report. Carriers responded by filtering harder. That is why unregistered business traffic gets blocked, and why A2P 10DLC registration exists. Our 10DLC explainer covers the mechanics.

The iPhone share explains the blue/green split. In the US, a large share of your recipients see iMessage by default. That's relevant if your brand cares how a message looks on arrival.

The open rate and response rate stats you should stop quoting

Two numbers appear on nearly every SMS marketing statistics page:

1. The near-perfect open rate stat. Usually attributed to Gartner. We couldn't find the original report, and neither can most of the pages that cite it.
2. "45% response rate for SMS." Also usually attributed to Gartner, with the same problem.

The direction is probably right. Texts sit in a notification-driven inbox with much less noise than email, and most people glance at them. But SMS has no read receipt that a sender can measure. Carriers report delivery, not opens. So any precise "open rate" for plain SMS is an estimate dressed up as a measurement.

What you can measure is replies and clicks. Conversational texts like appointment confirmations get the most replies from opted-in lists. Promotional campaigns usually land lower. Your own reply data after a few hundred sends will tell you far more than any roundup.

Consumer preference surveys

Many surveys claim that most consumers "prefer texting businesses." Nearly all of them are run by SMS vendors, which is a conflict of interest worth noting (we make Ready, so the same caution applies to us). We think the honest read is this: people like texts that are expected and useful, such as reminders, shipping updates and replies to questions they asked. They dislike promotions they never signed up for. The FTC scam data shows how quickly an unwanted text gets treated as suspect.

What the numbers mean for a business that's starting to text

Five practical conclusions follow from the stats above.

1. You're competing with friends and family, so keep it short

Your message lands between personal texts. Short messages also cost less, because SMS is billed by segment:

• One segment holds 160 GSM-7 characters.
• Longer messages split into 153-character segments.
• One emoji drops the limit to 70 characters (67 per segment once a message splits).

On Ready, curly quotes, long dashes and ellipses are swapped for plain characters before sending, so those don't inflate the count.

2. Do the cost math before you write the copy

Ready Standard is $0.0075/segment plus a $0.0045 carrier fee per segment. Inbound replies are billed the same way. This is a worked example with stated assumptions:

• List: 1,000 opted-in contacts.
• Message: a 175-character promo with one emoji. That's unicode, so 3 segments (67 × 3 = 201 ≥ 175).
• Cost: 1,000 × 3 × $0.0075 = $23 in Standard rate plus 3,000 × $0.0045 in carrier fees.

Ready's all-in prices per segment include the carrier fee but not screening: Scrub lists and Number validation, the two switches in Settings under Compliance, each add $0.003 per segment when switched on, shown as screening on your bill, and both are off by default. Unless you turn the opt-out footer off, the first text to each contact, and one again from time to time, also gets "Reply STOP to opt out" and your business name if the message does not already have them, so a text close to the segment limit can bill one more segment.

If you remove the emoji, the same 175 characters fit in 2 GSM-7 segments. That brings the cost to $15 plus 2,000 × $0.0045, a third less for the same words.

Twilio and GoHighLevel's LC Phone cost less per message. What Ready includes is self-serve registration and the full platform: CRM, pipeline, automations and a unified inbox. Our 10DLC cost breakdown itemizes every fee.

3. Register first, because the filtering is real

The scam numbers are why carriers filter unregistered traffic. The costs and limits on Ready:

• Registration charge: $25 at submit (the first month). The monthly cost after that is $25/mo for registration + $2 per number.
• Approval time: most approvals take 2 to 7 days.
• Before registering: an account can send up to 500 texts a month at its normal per-text rate.

Approval alone doesn't guarantee delivery. Content can still get filtered, which we cover in why approved campaigns still get filtered.

4. Plan for throughput, not just volume

National volume is irrelevant to your own sending speed. Your campaign's carrier limits decide that. These are approximations, since carriers publish no official rate card:

• Per-second rate: a fresh standard campaign typically gets roughly 1 to 4 segments per second. At an assumed 2 segments per second, the 3,000-segment example above takes about 25 minutes to go out.
• T-Mobile daily brand cap: starts around 2,000 messages a day at the lowest trust score.

Brand vetting ($79 Standard / $179 Enhanced, one-time) can raise that daily cap if it lifts you into a higher tier. Most senders don't need it. See whether brand vetting is worth it.

5. Consider the iPhone audience

With iPhones making up a large share of US devices, some businesses want messages to arrive blue, with their name and photo. Ready's blue line costs $99 a month per line plus 6 cents a segment, and needs no 10DLC registration. Each line can start up to 50 new conversations a day. Campaigns still send from regular numbers. Our blue bubble texting guide covers when it's worth it.

Compliance: the statistic that costs the most

The TCPA allows $500 to $1,500 per text in statutory damages for violations. With that exposure, compliance tooling is cheap insurance. Ready provides:

• Automatic STOP handling across campaigns.
• Quiet-hours holds based on the recipient's area.
• Optional litigator and DNC scrubbing. The standalone scrub is $0.005 per contact.
• A record of the sender's opt-in attestation for each campaign you send and each API send that attests consent.

That attestation record is not a per-contact consent record. Your store or signup form needs to keep the opt-in itself. Compliance stays the sender's responsibility. These tools reduce risk; they don't make anyone immune to lawsuits.

The practical takeaway

Americans send about 5.5 billion texts a day, and almost everyone has a phone that receives them. That reach is real. Most of the precise open rate stats aren't. Build your plan on what you can control:

• Keep messages short and count segments.
• Register before you scale.
• Text only people who opted in.
• Measure your own reply rate.

If you want to try it, sign up and add a card (one is required to send). Your first 20 texts are free one-to-one sends, so use them before you pay for registration. Pricing details are at tryready.com/pricing.

FAQ

How many texts are sent per day in the US, and per second? About 5.5 billion a day, or about 63,000 every second, averaged from CTIA's count of roughly 2 trillion SMS and MMS messages a year.

What's the average number of text messages per month? Nationally, roughly 167 billion a month, which is 2 trillion divided by 12. CTIA doesn't publish a per-person figure, so any "average texts per user" number you see needs its own source.

How many text messages are sent a day in the US? About 5.5 billion, derived from CTIA's count of roughly 2 trillion SMS and MMS messages a year (2022 survey, covering 2021). CTIA doesn't publish a daily figure, so this is an average.

How many texts are sent worldwide each day? No audited global SMS total exists. The often-repeated "23 billion" has no traceable source. On the app side, WhatsApp reported about 100 billion messages a day in 2020.

Is the famous SMS open rate stat real? It's commonly attributed to Gartner, but the original source is hard to find. SMS has no measurable open tracking, so treat it as folklore. Measure replies and clicks instead.

Does iMessage count in texting statistics? Not in CTIA's figures. iMessage travels over data, not the carrier SMS network. Apple last cited a peak of 200,000 iMessages per second, at WWDC 2016.

What does a business need before texting customers? Opted-in contacts and 10DLC registration. On Ready, registration is $25 at submit and most approvals take 2 to 7 days. You can send up to 500 texts a month while unregistered.