Porting a Phone Number to Twilio – Twilio Support

Objective

Porting your US telephone number is a seven step process that can take up to four (4) weeks depending on the type of number you are porting and the country the number is located in. The process includes coordination between our upstream provider and your service provider to transfer the number to Twilio.

Please keep in mind that for local US numbers, an approved A2P 10DLC campaign & brand registration is required to enable messaging on your ported number. As soon as you submit your port request, we encourage you to set up the A2P campaign using the Messaging Service, and get the campaign to the “Verified” status. However, you must wait to add the phone number to the Messaging Service until your port request has fully completed. Please allow 1 to 2 days until the SMS services are routed to Twilio, otherwise the A2P provisioning process may fail.

Please note, we do offer porting internationally, but we can't currently accept those via the Console. To see a list of countries offered internationally, please check the link above.

Procedure

1. Submit your port request. Log into your Twilio project and navigate to the Porting Request page. You will need the following for a successful request:

The authorized user or owner’s first and last name.
The corresponding service address. This must be an actual physical address. PO Boxes are not valid addresses.
A Letter of Authorization (LOA) signed by the authorized user and/or owner of the number(s). Note that the information on your LOA must match the authorized user name and service address provided by your current carrier.
US_LOA2022.pdf (100 KB)
Obtain a Customer Service Record (CSR).
A scanned (or electronic) copy of the most recent phone bill, within the last 30 days, that includes the account, owner/authorized user name, and address information for all the numbers you’d like to port.
Read the most common reason for rejections to avoid them.

Be sure to configure each phone number, particularly your voice URL, messaging URL, and/or SIP trunk, so that the phone numbers are ready in advance of the porting date. You can configure your numbers at any point of the porting process.

Find the numbers in Port In Request or Active Numbers to configure your numbers. Please refer to the following documents for more information:

2. Number gets approved by Twilio. If everything in Step 1 was done correctly, you can expect your Porting request to be approved in 24 hours. Again, depending on the type of number you are porting (for example, Toll Free or Landline), the approval time may vary.

3. Number is Submitted to Carrier Partner. This can take up to 24 hours. Your request is then submitted to your soon-to-be former carrier as a port request. During this time, do not close your account with your carrier and keep your numbers active.

4. Carrier Partner reaches out to Losing Carrier. This can take one (1) week to complete.

5. Response from carrier. At this point, your request will either be approved or rejected:

Approved: If approved, then you will receive a porting date of when your number is ported to Twilio.
Rejection: These occur for a variety of reasons, such as an incorrect PIN for an account, an address or zip code that doesn’t match the current carrier’s record, or a port request made by an unauthorized user on the account. Read more about common reasons for port request rejections here. Additionally, you will need to reach out to your losing carrier to find out what’s needed to move forward. Depending on the needs of the carrier, this will add an undetermined amount of time to your porting request.

6. Twilio reaches out to you with your porting date. Twilio will send you an email of your porting date for when your number will be transferred to Twilio. Once your date has passed and you’ve received email confirmation that the port has completed, you can begin using your number for Voice.

7. A2P registration process for the messaging capability of ported local numbers:

Once you’ve received confirmation that the port has completed and your A2P campaign is in the “Verified” status, please allow 1 to 2 days for the SMS routing to be updated and you may add the number to the Messaging Service.
You can check the 10DLC registration status of the number here, the messaging will remain blocked until the number moves to the “Registered” state. Once the number is on the status, you can begin using Messaging.