Template Categories Overview

How Meta categorizes WhatsApp message templates into marketing, utility, and authentication, effective July 1, 2025.

Meta’s template category guidelines define how every WhatsApp message template is categorized. The category you choose is validated against these guidelines when you submit a template for approval, and it determines how the template is priced and what content is allowed in it.

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.

Businesses can only send template messages to users who have subscribed to receive messages from them on WhatsApp.

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:

Situation	Resulting category
Mixed content — the template contains both utility and marketing content (e.g. an order update with a promo/offer)	Marketing
Unclear content — the template contents give no context (e.g. contents are only {{1}} or “Congratulations!”)	Marketing

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