---
title: "Delivery rate"
description: "Delivery rate is the share of sent messages that the network or channel confirms as delivered to the recipient's device, usually calculated as delivered messages divided by messages submitted, for a given campaign, route, country or period."
canonical: "https://omnichannels.ai/glossary/delivery-rate/"
language: "en"
updated: "2026-10-10"
publisher: "BroadNet Technologies"
brand: "OmniChannels.ai"
---

# Delivery rate

Canonical: https://omnichannels.ai/glossary/delivery-rate/
Language: en
Publisher: OmniChannels.ai by BroadNet Technologies

**Definition:** Delivery rate is the share of sent messages that the network or channel confirms as delivered to the recipient's device, usually calculated as delivered messages divided by messages submitted, for a given campaign, route, country or period.

For SMS, delivery status comes from delivery receipts (DLRs) returned by the operator's SMSC; for WhatsApp and RCS, from the platform's status webhooks. A message can be submitted and accepted by the network yet never delivered, for example because the phone is off, the number is invalid or the message was filtered.

Interpret the number with care. Some routes return delivery receipts that are not genuine (a known problem with grey routes), some operators send no final receipt, and an expired message (phone off beyond the validity period) counts as undelivered. Compare delivery rates per country and operator rather than one global figure.

Improve it by cleaning lists (format numbers in E.164, remove invalid or ported numbers with HLR lookups), registering sender IDs where required, avoiding content that triggers filters, and using direct routes. Channel fallback can recover messages that fail on the first channel.

Delivery rate tells you whether messages arrived, not whether they worked. Pair it with read rate, click-through rate and conversions.

## Example

```
10,000 submitted, 9,420 DELIVERED, 380 FAILED, 200 pending → delivery rate 94.2%
```