How many WhatsApp templates can you have?

A WhatsApp Business Account can hold 250 message templates on an unverified business portfolio, or up to 6,000 once the portfolio is verified and the display name approved, with a maximum of 100 templates created per hour. These figures come from Meta's template documentation, and almost no merchant-facing content mentions them.

They matter to exactly one kind of store: the kind that creates a template per product, per campaign or per variant. That store reaches 250 far sooner than it expects.

The limits

Note that verification does two jobs at once: it raises your template ceiling 24-fold, and it is also the fastest route from a 250-recipient messaging tier to 2,000. If you have not verified your business, that single task lifts two different ceilings.

Why stores hit 250

Almost always one of three habits:

1. A template per product. "Back in stock — blue mug", "back in stock — red mug". Fifty products, one restock template each, and you have used a fifth of your quota on one flow.
2. A template per campaign. A new one for every sale, festival and drop, never deleted.
3. A template per language. Legitimate and unavoidable — but it multiplies everything else.

Use variables instead of duplicating

The fix for the first two is the same: one template with variables, rather than many templates with fixed text.

There is a real constraint here worth stating plainly: only the body of a template can be personalised with variables. Header media and button parameters cannot, so a genuinely different image per product does need a different template — or a flow that sends the image as a separate step once the conversation window is open.

The 100-per-hour ceiling

This one bites during a migration. A store moving from another platform, or bulk-creating a seasonal set, can trip it and see creations start failing for no obvious reason. If you are creating templates in bulk, spread the work across hours.

Housekeeping

1. Delete last year's festival templates. They will not be reused, and each one is a slot.
2. Audit before a big launch, not during it.
3. Verify your business if you are anywhere near 250. It is the only way past it.
4. Consolidate near-duplicates into one variabled template.
5. Keep a naming convention so you can tell at a glance which flow owns which template — an automation sending a template you deleted fails at send time.

Rejections that look like limits

If template creation starts failing and you are nowhere near 250, the cause is usually content rather than quota — see why your template was rejected. The body is also capped at 1,024 characters, which is a per-template limit rather than an account one but gets confused with it.

And a template you no longer need is not the same as one Meta withdrew. Meta can recategorise or disable templates, and its policy enforcement documentation lists template misclassification among the triggers for account-level action. Deleting unused templates is housekeeping; having them removed for you is a warning.