No, you can still text your customers

If you have seen the headlines about new SMS rules starting on 1 July, you might be worried you are about to lose the ability to text your customers.

You are almost certainly fine. Here is the plain version.

From 1 July 2026 there is a new Australian rule about branded SMS. That is a text where the sender shows up as a name, the way a message from myGov, Australia Post or your bank arrives as a word at the top instead of a phone number. Those branded names now have to be registered, or the messages get blocked. It is an anti-scam measure, and a good one, because scammers love faking a trusted name at the top of a text.

Here is the bit the scary headlines skip.

If you text customers from your normal mobile number, none of this touches you. Your texts show your number, people can reply to them, and nothing changes on 1 July. Same goes for iMessage, WhatsApp and Messenger, the ways you probably actually message clients from your phone. Those are not SMS sender IDs, and the rule has nothing to do with them. Carry on as you are.

The rule only bites if you send SMS where your business name is the sender, the one-way kind with no number to reply to. That is almost always done through a bulk SMS platform or a booking system: appointment reminders, marketing blasts, that sort of thing. And here is the reassuring part. If a platform sends those for you, registering the name is their job, not yours, and they have to do it to keep working.

I can tell you exactly how that plays out, because I set it up for a bike shop a while back. I made a sender name for the owner so his reminders would come from his shop instead of a random number. The first message went through. Then nothing. The carriers had quietly decided an unregistered name looked like spam and stopped delivering it. It only started working again once the name was properly registered through Twilio. So the system has effectively been enforcing itself for years. The 1 July rule just makes it official.

So you probably do not need to do anything. Either you send from a number, in which case relax, or you send a branded name through a platform, in which case that platform has almost certainly handled it. The only case worth a check is if you run your own SMS setup and are not sure the name is registered, and that is a quick question for your provider.

Further reading, straight from the source: the ACMA's page on the SMS Sender ID Register.

The change is sensible, and most of you do not have to lift a finger. I would rather you heard that than spend a fortnight worried about something that was never going to be your problem.