US Cellular Announces New A2P Pass-Through Fees for Short Code and Toll-Free Messaging

Updated: Dec. 23, 2025 - This post was updated to reflect additional US Cellular A2P fee details announced after initial publication.

Carrier pass-through fees continue to rise, with US Cellular being the latest carrier to announce new A2P SMS charges.

Following closely behind T-Mobile’s recently announced 2026 A2P fee increases, US Cellular has confirmed new per-message fees that will impact Short Code,Toll-Free and 10DLC SMS and MMS messaging traffic beginning early next year.

What’s Changing

The following US Cellular A2P pass-through fees will go into effect on January 15, 2026:

• Billing: Fees will appear on February invoices for January traffic
• Applies to: Both MT and MO messages, depending on traffic type
• MO messages: Toll-Free SMS, 10DLC SMS, and 10DLC MMS‍
• Short Code MO messages: $0.00

These are carrier-imposed pass-through fees and apply uniformly across messaging providers. They are in addition to existing messaging and platform costs and will impact all Short Code, Toll-Free, and 10DLC programs delivering messages to subscribers on the US Cellular network.

Why This Matters

While US Cellular represents a smaller share of U.S. mobile subscribers compared to Tier 1 carriers, this update reinforces a clear industry pattern:

Carrier pass-through fees are increasing across the board—and they’re not slowing down.

As we just saw with T-Mobile’s announcement, carriers are continuing to push more cost and enforcement responsibility upstream to platforms, ISVs, and messaging providers. With both MT and MO fees now applying to certain traffic types, inefficient message delivery and retries can further increase carrier costs at scale.

The Bigger Picture

With multiple carriers announcing new A2P fees for 2026:

• Messaging costs are becoming less predictable
• Inefficient throughput management is getting more expensive
• Failed or throttled messages can now directly increase carrier fees paid

This is exactly why proactive throughput management and intelligent queueing are becoming essential—not optional—for high-volume A2P messaging.

We’ll continue tracking carrier fee changes as they’re announced and sharing what they mean for platforms running A2P SMS at scale.