Does your carrier support RCS?

Checking your own phone takes twenty seconds and is more reliable than any list, including ours. Start there.

Check your own carrier in 20 seconds

Why we lead with this rather than a table: provisioning is decided per line, not per company. Two people on the same carrier, on the same plan, in the same city can get different answers, because rollouts move account by account. A list can tell you what is likely. Your phone tells you what is true.

The three big US networks

Two separate questions live in this table and people constantly merge them. "Does RCS work" and "is RCS encrypted end to end" are not the same question, and a carrier can answer yes to the first and no to the second. The second column is the one that decides whether your messages are private.

We are not going to pretend the encryption column is fuller than it is. Carriers have not been consistent about announcing when the encrypted variant went live on their networks, and we have not yet confirmed any of them against a primary source. Rather than fill the column with plausible guesses, we leave it marked and send you to the padlock on your own device, which cannot be out of date.

Why prepaid and MVNO lines are different

A resold or prepaid line runs on one of the big networks — the towers are the same towers, the coverage map is the same map. So people reasonably assume the features are the same features. For RCS that assumption breaks, and it breaks in a way nobody tells you about at signup.

RCS needs more than radio coverage. It needs the line to be registered with a messaging service on the network's side, and that provisioning is a separate arrangement between the host network and the brand reselling it. Some brands have it. Some have it on newer plans but not older ones. Some inherit it automatically after a migration and some never do. The result is that your phone can have full bars, full data, an up-to-date operating system, the RCS switch on — and still sit on "Setting up" forever, with nothing wrong that you can fix.

Encrypted RCS makes it worse, because it is a second provisioning step on top of the first. A prepaid line can perfectly well have working RCS and no encryption, and there is no indication of this anywhere in the interface except the padlock.

Brands this affects

These are the US prepaid and resold brands people ask about most, with the network each generally rides on. We deliberately publish no support values for them. unverified We could not keep per-brand values accurate, so a table of them would be worse than no table — it would look authoritative while going stale.

Outside the US

We do not publish carrier-by-carrier data outside the US, because we could not keep it accurate. There are hundreds of operators, they announce messaging changes in their own languages on their own websites, and a stale list about someone's mobile privacy is worse than no list. Building one would also mean generating a page per operator, which is exactly the kind of thin, templated output that search engines have spent the last year removing — and we would rather be useful than large.

The good news is that the on-device check above works identically everywhere. The RCS status screen in Google Messages will tell you what your operator has done for your line regardless of which country you are in, and the padlock means the same thing everywhere.

One thing that does travel: roaming changes the answer. Being provisioned at home does not guarantee RCS abroad, and the failure mode there can cost you money. That has its own guide.

Version facts on this page: not verified yet — the site-wide verification pass has not been completed. See the update log

Next

• Put your carrier into the full checker and see what changes
• Whether your specific conversation is encrypted
• RCS stuck on "Connecting" — the six-step fix
• When each change landed