These guidelines are effective July 1, 2025.
The three categories
Message templates can be categorized as:- Marketing — Enable businesses to achieve a wide range of goals, from generating awareness to driving sales and retargeting customers. Examples can include new product/service/feature announcements; targeted promotions/offers; or cart abandonment reminders.
- Utility — Enable businesses to send non-promotional messages that are either specific to and requested by the user or essential or critical to the user. Examples can include order-related updates, payment reminders, or fraud awareness messages.
- Authentication — Enable businesses to verify a user’s identity, potentially at various steps of the customer journey.
Category deep dives
- Marketing templates — message objectives, example templates, and the mixed-content and unclear-content rules that pull templates into the marketing category.
- Utility templates — the non-promotional requirement, allowed message objectives, and the “essential or critical to the user” use cases.
- Authentication templates — the most restricted category: preset templates, one-time password buttons, and content restrictions.
Common categorization pitfalls
Meta applies two default rules that frequently surprise template authors. Both result in a template being categorized as marketing even when you submitted it as utility:The example templates in these guides are illustrative only. Templates
containing similar content, or content including the example text, may be
categorized differently based on their exact content.
Reference
Meta’s own guidelines on the WhatsApp Business Platform:- Pricing on the WhatsApp Business Platform
- Rates and volume tiers on the WhatsApp Business Platform
- Template category guidelines on the WhatsApp Business Platform
- Message templates developer documentation