September 4, 2026. HighLevel is raising the carrier fees it passes through on US messaging from October 1, and the sentence that matters most in the September 3 announcement is the reassuring one: "No action is required on your end. The updated rates will apply automatically from the effective date." For an agency rebilling SMS to clients, that is the problem rather than the comfort. Your cost moves on October 1. The price you charge does not move unless you move it.
What is changing and by how much
- Verizon outbound SMS covering long code, short code, toll-free, Authy and Verify goes from $0.0045 to $0.0050 per message, an increase of 11.1%.
- Verizon outbound RCS Rich moves on the same schedule, $0.0045 to $0.0050.
- The Other carrier category covering long code, short code Group B, toll-free, Authy and Verify goes from $0.0040 to $0.0042, an increase of 5.0%.
- Short Code Group A stays at $0.0025, the only rate in the notice that does not move.
- Effective October 1, 2026, applied automatically, with no opt-in and no confirmation step.
HighLevel attributes the change to its downstream carriers rather than to its own margin, which is the usual and probably accurate explanation. Carrier fees are a pass-through that sits underneath whatever a platform charges per segment.
Why an automatic increase is the problem
The absolute numbers are small enough to dismiss, so do the arithmetic before dismissing them. Five hundredths of a cent per message means every 2,000 Verizon-routed messages costs one extra dollar. A sub-account sending 10,000 US segments a month adds about $5 on the Verizon-routed share. Run twenty of those and the agency-wide number is tens of dollars a month, not hundreds.
So the cost is not the story. The mechanism is. If you resell messaging in SaaS mode, you set a per-segment rebill rate for clients at some point in the past and it has been sitting in a settings screen ever since. That rate is a fixed number. The carrier fee beneath it just became a variable one, and it changed by 11.1% without anyone in your agency approving it or being asked to. Nobody signs off on a margin compression that arrives as a changelog entry.
Two details in the table are worth reading twice. First, RCS Rich now costs the same as SMS on the Verizon route, so if you were staying on plain SMS partly because rich messaging carried a carrier-fee premium, that specific argument is gone from October 1. Second, toll-free appears explicitly in both increased lines. The same number type that just got harder to register, now that toll-free verification requires policy URLs from September 15, also costs more to send from two weeks later.
What it means for operators
Diary the date and re-read your rebill rate. Put October 1 in the calendar with a note to open the SaaS configuration for every sub-account and compare your per-segment price against the new pass-through. This takes minutes and it is the only step that actually protects the margin.
Tell clients before their invoice does. If you decide to pass the increase on, a short note in September lands very differently from an unexplained line item in November. If you decide to absorb it, say so, because a cost you swallowed is worth more as a conversation than as a silence.
Check what you are actually sending. Fees now differ by route and by message class, so segment counts and message type matter more than they did. Long messages that split into multiple segments are billed as multiple messages, which is where most surprise volume comes from.
Treat this as a standing review, not a one-off. This is the second time in recent months that pricing under an agency has moved by announcement. If nobody owns the job of reading platform changelogs and translating them into account settings, the job does not happen. That review is part of how we run GoHighLevel accounts for clients, and it usually pays for itself the first time a rate moves.
Frequently Asked Questions
Verizon outbound SMS across long code, short code, toll-free, Authy and Verify rises from $0.0045 to $0.0050 per message, an increase of 11.1%, and Verizon outbound RCS Rich moves by the same amount. The Other carrier category rises from $0.0040 to $0.0042, an increase of 5.0%. Short Code Group A stays unchanged at $0.0025.
No, and that is the catch. HighLevel states that no action is required and the updated rates apply automatically from the effective date. If you resell messaging to clients, your cost per message changes on October 1 while your rebill rate stays wherever you set it, so the margin moves unless you change the price yourself.
Carrier fees are a pass-through charged by the mobile networks that deliver the message, and they sit underneath whatever the platform charges per segment. HighLevel attributes this increase to its downstream carriers responding to delivery and infrastructure costs, which is why it lands as a notice rather than as a negotiation.
Yes. Toll-free is named explicitly in both of the increased lines, on the Verizon route and in the Other category. That matters because toll-free verification also gets stricter from September 15, 2026, when carriers begin rejecting submissions without privacy policy and terms URLs. The same number type gets harder to register and more expensive to send from within a fortnight.