WhatsApp error 131049: Meta chose not to deliver.

Code 131049 means Meta decided not to deliver a marketing template to this recipient in order to protect the recipient's experience. It is the visible side of the per-user marketing template message limits: WhatsApp caps how many marketing messages a single user receives from all businesses within a period, and it also factors in how little that user engages with marketing. When the recipient is at their limit, your marketing template is dropped with 131049, and you are not charged.

This is per recipient and per period, not a judgment on your account. Your other recipients are unaffected, and the same person will become reachable again when their limit resets. Meta's guidance is to wait at least 24 hours before trying again and to avoid immediate retries, which will only produce the same response while the limit is in effect.

Utility and authentication templates, and service messages inside the 24-hour window, are not subject to this limit.

131049 arrives almost exclusively in the statuses webhook, because the drop happens at delivery time: the synchronous response is a normal 200 with a message ID, and the failure follows moments later. That makes webhook handling mandatory for honest campaign reporting - if events are missing, work through the webhook debugging guide. Two distinctions keep triage straight: unlike 131050 it is not a choice the user made, so it needs no suppression-list entry, and unlike 131048 it says nothing about your number's quality. Providers built on the Cloud API relay the code in their delivery callbacks rather than the send response, so with a BSP look in the failure payload. Since the message is not delivered, it is not billed.

{
  "statuses": [{
    "id": "wamid.HBgMOTE5ODc2NTQzMjEwFQIAERgSRjU4Q0Q5RDQ2RjhGNjcyNEEwAA==",
    "status": "failed",
    "timestamp": "1755584400",
    "recipient_id": "919876543210",
    "errors": [{
      "code": 131049,
      "title": "This message was not delivered to maintain healthy ecosystem engagement.",
      "message": "This message was not delivered to maintain healthy ecosystem engagement.",
      "error_data": { "details": "Marketing message limit for this user reached." }
    }]
  }]
}

Build frequency capping and engagement scoring into your marketing dispatch so you send fewer messages to people who are least likely to want them; those are exactly the sends Meta will drop. Keep transactional and marketing content strictly separated by template category, and treat a rising 131049 rate as a signal to tighten segmentation rather than to add retries. Per-user marketing limits sit alongside the per-number messaging tiers; both cap marketing reach, but this one belongs to the recipient, not to you.