WhatsApp does not publish a fixed number. The limit adapts to each person: Meta's documentation says it depends on their recent read rate for marketing messages and on how many messages they currently have in their inbox from friends, family and businesses.
The cap is per user, not per business. A merchant's campaign can therefore be filtered even if its own cadence is modest, simply because the recipient has already received marketing messages from other brands. The API reports the failure with error code 131049, and Meta asks businesses to wait at least 24 hours before retrying that person.
Two geographic rules sit next to it (as of October 8, 2026): the limits are not active for messages sent from, or to, the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, Japan and South Korea, and WhatsApp does not currently deliver marketing templates to United States phone numbers at all. Marketing messages sent inside an open customer service window do not count toward the limit.
The practical response is relevance over volume: send fewer campaigns to engaged segments, which is how WhatsApp campaigns are built in Kanal from Shopify customer data.
