# Delivery rate

> The delivery rate is the share of sent messages confirmed delivered to handsets; it depends on the route, the list quality and the destination, and it is the least useful number in a report when read alone.

Delivered divided by sent looks like a quality score, but it mixes what the provider controls (the route) with what the sender controls (the list) and what nobody controls (phones that are off). A 92% rate on a fresh list to Germany and a 92% rate on an old list to Nigeria say very different things.

Read it per destination and next to the failure breakdown: a rising share of unknown numbers is a list problem, a sudden drop on one country is a route problem, and absent subscribers are just phones that are off.

At SMSMeteor: delivery rate per route is what decides which route a destination uses; your report shows it per country with the reasons behind every failure.

Related terms: [Message status lifecycle](https://smsmeteor.com/glossary/message-status), [Failed vs rejected](https://smsmeteor.com/glossary/failed-vs-rejected), [SMS route](https://smsmeteor.com/glossary/sms-route), [Unknown subscriber](https://smsmeteor.com/glossary/unknown-subscriber)

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Source: https://smsmeteor.com/glossary/delivery-rate (HTML). Generated by SMSMeteor from the same data as the page. Summary of the whole site: https://smsmeteor.com/llms.txt