Definition
A quality rating is Meta's assessment of how WhatsApp users respond to a business's messages, based on usage, feedback such as blocks and reports, and engagement such as read rates. Meta rates both templates and phone numbers.
For templates, Meta's documentation lists four values. GREEN means high quality, with little or no negative feedback. YELLOW means medium quality: negative feedback from multiple users, or low read rates. RED means low quality, at risk of being paused or disabled. UNKNOWN means the rating is still pending. New templates start as UNKNOWN.
Template quality affects template pacing and pausing. A template whose status moves away from APPROVED cannot be sent until it is restored. Phone numbers also have a quality rating, shown in WhatsApp Manager, and Meta's eligibility rules for higher throughput require at least a Medium phone-number rating.
Under the portfolio-based messaging limits Meta introduced in October 2025, a drop in phone number quality no longer automatically lowers the messaging limit. However, high-quality messaging remains a condition for scaling up.
Quality is driven by relevance and consent. Send only to opted-in users, segment by interest, avoid repeated identical blasts, include a clear opt-out, and stop sending a template whose rating turns yellow until you understand why.