Quality rating in one sentence
Quality rating is Meta's measure of how customers respond to your messages. It is calculated continuously per phone number and visible inside Business Manager. A high rating means happy recipients, a low rating means complaints, blocks or non-engagement, and the difference shows up directly in how many people you can message per day.
Three states
Quality rating is shown as Green, Yellow or Red. Green means you are well within healthy limits. Yellow means you are slipping toward problems and warrants attention. Red means you have crossed the threshold and your account faces messaging tier downgrades or restrictions.
What feeds the rating
User reports are the strongest negative signal. Blocks weigh heavily too. Non-delivery, when recipients have left WhatsApp entirely, is neutral but gets noticed in aggregate. Reads, replies and positive engagement raise quality. Sending volume itself is not the input; how the audience reacts is.
How fast it changes
Quality rating moves over a rolling window. You can drop from Green to Yellow within hours of a bad campaign and recover in a few days if you stop the offending behaviour. Persistent issues take much longer to repair because the rolling window keeps the bad signal alive.
Common reasons for falling
Sending too frequently to the same audience. Sending generic messages with no personalisation. Messaging customers whose opt-in is stale or never existed. Buying contact lists. Skipping segmentation and blasting an entire database. Every one of these is avoidable with basic discipline.
Recovering quickly
Stop the offending campaign immediately. Pause marketing sends and rely on customer-initiated service messages for a few days. Audit your opt-in list and remove inactive contacts. Switch to better-targeted segments and shorter, more relevant content. Most accounts recover from Yellow in under a week if behaviour changes.
What red means
A red rating triggers automatic restrictions. Your sending tier may drop, capping how many unique users you can message in a 24-hour period. If red persists, Meta can suspend the number entirely. Treat any move into red as a fire drill rather than a metric to monitor.
Watching the right thing
Quality rating reacts to user behaviour, so look at what users do, not just what you send. Track block rates per template, complaint rates per campaign, and reply rates as a positive signal. Optimise for replies and the rating tends to look after itself.