TCPA for Insurance Callers After the One-to-One Vacatur

Four gates decide whether a dial into a life or final expense book is lawful, and only one of them has anything to do with the dialer: the federal rules at 47 U.S.C. § 227 and 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200, a National Do Not Call Registry scrub no more than 31 days old, an internal do-not-call list that every agent and every channel actually shares, and the mini-TCPA statute of the state being dialed into. Two things have changed since 2024 that most published guidance in this vertical has not caught up with — the FCC’s one-to-one consent rule was vacated on January 24, 2025 and deleted from the rulebook later that year, and the FCC’s rulebook is no longer binding on the district court where a case gets filed.

Last reviewed: 2026-07-29.

This is written for the person who runs the phones: an agency owner with two to fifty seats, a sales manager who sets pacing, or a producer about to turn on a multi-line dialer. Every regulatory claim below carries a citation you can forward to your E&O carrier. Every number is either attributed to who published it and when, or labelled as an illustration to be replaced with your own figure.

Scope: what this page covers, and which page covers the rest

This is the reference layer: the federal rules that apply everywhere, the 2025–2026 changes, the arithmetic that behaves differently at agency scale than it does in a 200-seat room, and the record set that decides a case. It deliberately publishes no per-state calling window, no per-state damages figure and no per-state call cap. Every one of those rows needs a citation to the statute itself and a verification date, and a hub that reproduces them from memory is the exact failure mode documented further down.

Those live on the spoke pages, in the order an agency usually needs them:

1. TCPA calling hours by state — the federal 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. window, the stricter state windows, and the reason an area code is not a time zone.
2. State mini-TCPA laws insurance agents must track — which states let a consumer sue personally, under which statute, and for how much.
3. Do bought insurance leads count as TCPA consent? — what a lead vendor’s consent record proves, what it does not, and how to test it before you buy.
4. A2P 10DLC registration for insurance agents — the carrier regime for texting, why life and final expense campaigns get rejected, and why registration is not compliance.
5. TCPA demand letter: what agents should do first — the order of operations for the hour after the letter arrives.

Adjacent, non-compliance topics belong elsewhere: pacing mechanics and dialer throughput are covered under dialers, what leads cost per issued policy under final expense leads, and where a consent artifact has to live to be retrievable five years later under CRM.

The four gates every dial has to clear

A dial is lawful only if all four are satisfied. They are independent, they are enforced by different bodies, and satisfying one says nothing about the others.

Gate 1 has two independent triggers, and the second is the one that kills agents. Under 47 U.S.C. § 227(b)(1)(A)(iii), a call to a wireless number is unlawful without consent if it uses an automatic telephone dialing system or an artificial or prerecorded voice. A prerecorded drop or a ringless voicemail is exposure whether or not any autodialer was involved, and no amount of “our dialer is not an ATDS” analysis touches it.

That matters because Facebook, Inc. v. Duguid, 592 U.S. 395 (April 1, 2021) narrowed “automatic telephone dialing system” to equipment with the capacity to store or produce numbers using a random or sequential number generator. Dialing from a stored list of leads is not, by itself, ATDS use. So a multi-line power dialer pulling from a CRM list is probably not an ATDS — and that resolves almost none of an agency’s real exposure, because DNC claims under § 227(c) and prerecorded-voice claims under § 227(b) need no ATDS finding at all. That is where the plaintiff bar went after Duguid, and where they still are.

Calling hours are a gate too

Federal quiet hours are 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. local time at the called party’s location for telephone solicitations to residential subscribers, under 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200(c)(1). The caller’s time zone is irrelevant, and several states are stricter. A petition asking the FCC to clarify whether those hours apply to marketing texts sent with prior express written consent drew a Public Notice in March 2025, with comments due April 10 and replies April 25, 2025; as of this review the FCC has not ruled, so the question is open. The state-by-state detail is on TCPA calling hours by state.

What actually changed between 2024 and now

One-to-one consent is dead, and it was real long enough to be believable

The FCC’s 2023 Second Report and Order (FCC 23-107, the “lead generator loophole” order) really did rewrite prior express written consent. Part III.D of that order amended 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200(f)(9) to say a consumer could consent only to one identified seller at a time, and only to calls “logically and topically associated with the interaction that prompted the consent.” That is quoted from the Eleventh Circuit’s opinion describing the rule, not from a summary of it. The rule was published, it was scheduled to take effect, and the FCC postponed its implementation while the challenge was pending — which is why so much guidance froze on the version that was about to arrive.

On January 24, 2025 the Eleventh Circuit granted the petition in Insurance Marketing Coalition Ltd. v. FCC, No. 24-10277, and vacated Part III.D as exceeding the FCC’s statutory authority, striking both the one-to-one requirement and the logically-and-topically-associated requirement. The FCC did not seek further review, and by final rule published in the Federal Register on August 29, 2025 it deleted the vacated language and restored the prior definition at § 64.1200(f)(9).

So: as of this review there is no federal one-to-one consent requirement, and a shared or multi-seller lead form is not per se unlawful under the TCPA. That is a statement about federal law only. State “express written consent” definitions were never governed by the FCC rule, and several of them require the specific seller to be identified. If an agency loosened its consent standard in 2025 because it read that IMC set it free, and it dials Florida, Oklahoma, Maryland or Washington, it increased its state-law exposure while celebrating. The state layer is on state mini-TCPA laws, and what to demand from a vendor is on lead vendor consent.

Revocation has been live since April 11, 2025, and only one slice is delayed

This is the error that costs agencies money today, because it runs in the direction of inaction. The FCC’s consent-revocation rules took effect April 11, 2025 and are enforceable now. Under 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200(a)(10):

• A consumer may revoke consent by any reasonable method that clearly expresses a desire not to receive further calls or texts.
• Replying to a text with stop, quit, end, revoke, opt out, cancel or unsubscribe is per se reasonable, as are automated opt-out mechanisms on a call and a caller-designated website or phone number.
• A caller may not designate an exclusive means of revocation. A script or landing page telling a consumer that replying STOP to one number is the only way to opt out is the thing the rule prohibits.
• Revocation must be honoured within a reasonable time not to exceed ten business days.

A single confirmatory message is permitted under the same paragraph, § 64.1200(a)(10), provided it does no more than confirm the opt-out and carries no marketing content. The five-minute window and the narrow clarification question it may ask come from the FCC’s 2024 revocation order as reported by Kelley Drye, not from the text of the rule, which is why it is attributed here rather than cited to a subsection.

What was delayed is one narrow slice: the piece of § 64.1200(a)(10) that would treat a single opt-out as cutting off the caller’s messages on unrelated topics as well. That has been waived twice by the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau — first in Order DA 25-312, then in Order DA 26-12, released January 6, 2026, which pushed it to January 31, 2027 while the FCC digests comments on its 2025 further notice. Both orders are cited in FCC 25-76 at footnote 123.

A great deal of published guidance compresses all of this into “the revocation rule is delayed to 2027.” That is false, and it is the kind of false that produces a violation today rather than a wasted afternoon. It has now been extended twice; the honest posture is to build the cross-topic behaviour in now, because a third extension is a guess and the FCC has given no commitment to one.

The FCC is no longer the last word

McLaughlin Chiropractic Associates, Inc. v. McKesson Corp., 606 U.S. ___ (June 20, 2025), held 6–3, Kavanaugh, J., that the Hobbs Act does not bind district courts in civil enforcement proceedings to the FCC’s interpretation of the TCPA. Courts determine the statute’s meaning independently. Combined with the end of Chevron deference in Loper Bright (2024), the practical result is that FCC orders and safe harbours are persuasive, not controlling, in private TCPA litigation.

Two 2026 appellate decisions show what that looks like in practice, and neither is national law:

• Fifth Circuit (TX, LA, MS). In Bradford v. Sovereign Pest Control of TX, Inc., decided in late February 2026, the court held the statute requires only “prior express consent” — oral or written — for autodialed or prerecorded telemarketing calls to cell phones, rejecting the FCC’s prior-express-*written*-consent requirement as beyond the agency’s authority. Reported sources differ on whether the opinion issued February 25 or February 26, so no day is stated here. The FCC’s written-consent rule remains on the books and enforceable by the FCC and in courts outside that circuit.
• Seventh Circuit (IL, IN, WI). In Steidinger v. Blackstone Medical Services, decided in July 2026, the court held that text messages are not “telephone calls” under 47 U.S.C. § 227(c)(5), eliminating the private do-not-call cause of action for texts in that circuit. It expressly distinguished § 227(b) claims, so autodialer and prerecorded-voice theories are untouched, and FCC enforcement authority is unaffected. It creates a split with the Ninth Circuit’s contrary holding in Howard v. Republican National Committee.

Neither decision is a licence to relax. What both mean operationally is narrower and more useful: a compliance programme whose load-bearing justification is “the FCC said this was fine in a declaratory ruling” is weaker in 2026 than the identical programme was in 2024. The posture that survives a change of venue is one built to the statute, with the FCC’s rules treated as a floor that is also met.

Receipts: pages ranking today that still teach the vacated rule

The claim that competing guidance is stale is easy to make and rarely checked, so here is the check. Both pages below were retrieved on 2026-07-29, both carry 2026 dates, and both describe the one-to-one consent rule as current law without mentioning that the Eleventh Circuit vacated it eighteen months ago. Links are nofollow because we are citing them as evidence, not vouching for them.

This is not stupidity, which is why it keeps happening. Both statements were correct descriptions of the law as it was scheduled to exist in January 2025. The rule was real, it was published, it had an effective date. The failure is never re-checking. The same search also turned up pages that get it right, including a lead vendor’s February 2026 guide naming the vacatur and its date — so the category is not uniformly wrong. A stale page and a current page rank side by side, indistinguishable to the reader, which is why the review date on a compliance page matters more than the byline.

The abandonment arithmetic a large room hides and a small one cannot

47 C.F.R. § 64.1200(a)(7) sets the multi-line dialing rules, and the denominator is the whole story. The rule prohibits abandoning more than three percent of all telemarketing calls that are answered live by a person, measured over a 30-day period for a single calling campaign. A call is abandoned if it is not connected to a live sales representative within two seconds of the called person’s completed greeting. The same subsection prohibits disconnecting an unanswered call before at least 15 seconds or four rings, and where no live representative is available it requires a prerecorded identification and opt-out message — naming the business on whose behalf the call was placed and giving a telephone number — within those same two seconds, under § 64.1200(a)(7)(i).

Read the denominator again: live answers, per campaign, over 30 days. Not dials, and not the whole book.

The first three columns below are that rule applied arithmetically. The fourth applies one illustrative event — a pacing setting left too aggressive for a single afternoon, producing 25 abandons. The 25 is chosen to make the shape visible; it is not a measured failure rate from any system.

Two consequences follow from that denominator.

The percentage is a lagging measurement on a fixed window. A 200-answer campaign that takes seven abandons on a Tuesday cannot dilute them before the window closes. A 20,000-answer room absorbs the identical mistake unnoticed. The smaller operation is not safer; it has less denominator to hide in.

”Per campaign” is a setting, not a description. Splitting one book into six campaigns by lead source creates six small denominators instead of one large one. That split is usually made for reporting reasons, by someone who did not know it was also being made here. Pacing mechanics and what the controls actually do are covered under dialers.

The unhelpful conclusion: a room whose campaigns each produce a few hundred live answers over 30 days is dialing against a denominator too small to absorb one bad afternoon, and multi-line dialing multiplies independent violations from a single misconfiguration at the same rate it multiplies contacts. One line with clean records is a better legal position than four with a pacing setting nobody audits.

The FCC has proposed deleting this rule. It is a proposal.

FCC 25-76 was adopted October 28, 2025 and released October 29, 2025, in CG Docket No. 17-59, WC Docket No. 17-97, CG Docket No. 02-278 and CG Docket No. 25-307. At paragraph 97 it seeks comment on eliminating both the 15-second/four-ring rule and the three-percent abandonment cap. At paragraphs 101–103 it proposes to amend § 64.1200(a)(10) — not only the cross-topic piece, but also whether to let callers designate the exclusive means by which a consumer may revoke, which is the opposite of the rule in force today. Nothing in that proceeding is law. As of this review the 3% cap, the ring-time rule and the reasonable-means revocation standard are all in force. Separately, the FTC’s Telemarketing Sales Rule carries its own abandoned-call provision at 16 C.F.R. § 310.4(b)(1)(iv) with a parallel three-percent safe harbour at § 310.4(b)(4), which an FCC rule change would not touch.

The 31-day scrub window, worked

The safe harbour at 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200(c)(2) is procedural, and that is the part agencies miss. It requires written procedures, trained personnel, a maintained internal list, and a process that uses “a version of the national do-not-call registry obtained from the administrator of the registry no more than 31 days prior to the date any call is made.”

A list obtained on day zero covers calls made on days 0 through 31 — 32 days of dialing. After that the safe harbour is unavailable for every dial in the gap, whether or not the specific number ever changed status. It is a date test, not a proportion test. An agency that downloads quarterly and argues that hardly anyone registered in the interim has not made an argument the safe harbour recognises.

Monthly is technically compliant and operationally fragile: a 30-day cadence leaves one day of margin against the 31-day limit, so any slip — a holiday, a vendor outage, the one person who runs the download being on leave — puts every dial past day 31 outside the safe harbour until the next download lands. Weekly costs nothing and carries three weeks of margin.

Scale matters here too. The FTC’s National Do Not Call Registry Data Book for fiscal year 2025 reported more than 258 million actively registered numbers at the end of that fiscal year, and more than 2.6 million consumer complaints over the same twelve months. Registrations do not expire — the Do-Not-Call Improvement Act of 2007, effective February 2008, ended the old five-year lapse — and wireless numbers on the registry are presumed residential and protected. What share of any particular purchased list that represents is not something we have a source for, and no such figure is published here; the point is only that the registry is large enough that a stale scrub is not a theoretical exposure.

One more thing that is not the same rule: the established business relationship exemption covers a purchase or transaction within the preceding 18 months, or an inquiry or application within the preceding 3 months. It exempts a caller from the national DNC prohibition only. It supplies no § 227(b) consent for an autodialed or prerecorded call to a wireless number, and it does not survive a company-specific do-not-call request.

What exposure costs on paper, and what it usually costs in fact

The paper arithmetic first, because it is the number every vendor page quotes and almost none qualify.

Statutory damages under 47 U.S.C. § 227(b)(3) are $500 per violation, which a court may treble to $1,500 for a wilful or knowing violation. Under § 227(c)(5) — the do-not-call private right of action — the plaintiff must have received more than one call within a 12-month period, and damages are discretionary, “up to $500,” not mandatory. The TCPA sets no limitations period of its own; federal courts apply the four-year federal catch-all at 28 U.S.C. § 1658(a), because the TCPA was enacted in 1991, after the December 1, 1990 cut-off in that section.

Work it for a four-seat room. Every input below is an assumption you should replace with your own dialer report; none of them is a measured industry figure.

• 150,000 dials in a year (read this off your own system).
• A defect rate of 0.5% — one dial in two hundred to a number that should not have been dialed, from a stale scrub, a missed revocation, or a consent record that does not exist.
• 150,000 × 0.005 = 750 exposed calls.
• 750 × $500 = $375,000. Trebled: $1,125,000.

Now the counterweight, which is what makes the first number useful rather than theatrical. That figure is a ceiling reached only if every exposed call becomes a claim, every claim succeeds, and the court trebles. None of those is automatic: most exposed calls never produce a plaintiff, § 227(b) trebling is discretionary rather than mandatory, and a § 227(c) claim needs more than one call in twelve months and carries discretionary damages. What a single-plaintiff matter typically settles for is a number we could not trace to a docket or a published survey, so no settlement figure appears on this page.

The variable that actually decides an agency’s risk is not the count of exposed calls. It is how many distinct numbers share the same defect, because that is what separates a demand letter from a class definition.

Filing volume tells you which way the wind is blowing. WebRecon, which tracks consumer-litigation filings monthly, reported 270 TCPA suits filed in May 2026, of which 216 (80%) were class actions, and 1,398 TCPA suits year to date through May 2026, up 29.6% on the same period in 2025 (WebRecon, published May 28, 2026). Its March 2026 report gave 283 filings for the month, 220 of them class actions, and 798 year to date, up 23.7% (published May 4, 2026). Class actions running at four filings in five is the practical argument for fixing campaign-wide defects before number-specific ones. Whether an agency could absorb the cost of defending a certified class at all is an agency economics question rather than a legal one, and it is the reason the cheap procedural fixes below are worth doing this week.

Where the liability actually sits: the lead record, not the dialer

The buyer holds the bag. That is not a theory; it was litigated to class certification in June 2026.

In Ward v. Liberty Mutual Insurance Co., the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts (Judge Brian E. Murphy) certified two TCPA classes against the lead buyer on June 12, 2026: a prerecorded-voice class of more than 20,000 members and a national-DNC class of more than 7,000. Four other companies touched that lead — Next Level Media generated it from a website, All Web Leads resold it, Jornaya documented the consent record, and Drips Holdings placed the calls — and none of them was a defendant in the certified classes. Liberty Mutual was. The court held that whether the lead website’s form could constitute consent to be contacted by Liberty Mutual was a question common to the entire class: as the court put it, either the law required Liberty Mutual to be named on the consent form, defeating its defence across the board, or it did not, allowing the defence to be proven across the board. Either way it resolves for everyone at once, which is how a bad lead source stops being a series of individual disputes and becomes one certified class.

Three things follow for an agency buying leads.

”TCPA-compliant leads” is a marketing phrase with no legal definition. No regulator issues that certification. The caller is the defendant.

An indemnity is worth what the indemnitor is worth. The clause to read is the liability cap, not the promise above it: an indemnity capped at fees paid can return no more than what was spent with that vendor, whatever the defence ends up costing. We have no sourced figure for typical TCPA defence costs, so none is given here — but the cap is a number already written in the contract, and it is readable today.

Consent has no federal expiry date, and that is not comforting. No FCC rule says a lead goes stale at 90 days or twelve months; anyone publishing such a period invented it. The genuine problem with aged leads is number reassignment, which is separate exposure. Valid consent from a prior subscriber is not consent from the current one. The FCC’s Reassigned Numbers Database safe harbour at 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200(m) protects only a caller who actually queried the database and got back a response that the number had not been permanently disconnected since consent was given — and after McLaughlin, the weight a district court gives an FCC-created safe harbour is arguable in a way it was not in 2024.

The full vendor audit — including the request to produce ten historical consent artifacts and what an evasive answer looks like — is on lead vendor consent. What lead types cost per issued policy, which is the other half of that decision, is under final expense leads.

Prerecorded voice, AI voice, and the consent question underneath

An artificial or prerecorded voice used for telemarketing to a wireless number requires prior express consent under 47 U.S.C. § 227(b)(1)(A)(iii), and prior express written consent under the FCC’s rule at 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200(a)(2) — with the Fifth Circuit caveat noted above.

The FCC closed the obvious question in a Declaratory Ruling adopted February 2, 2024 and released February 8, 2024 (FCC 24-17, CG Docket No. 23-362), confirming that AI technologies generating human voices, including voice cloning, fall within “artificial or prerecorded voice” for TCPA purposes. The ruling did not make AI voice calls illegal; it placed them under the existing artificial-voice rules, which carry consent, identification, disclosure and opt-out obligations.

The operational translation is short. AI dialing is a consent problem before it is a technology problem. A synthetic voice on an outbound telemarketing call to a cell number sits in the strictest consent tier in the statute, and the technology’s realism is legally irrelevant. Note also the interaction with § 64.1200(a)(7): a dialer that abandons a call must play a recorded identification message, which is itself a prerecorded message and carries its own content requirements.

Does the Telemarketing Sales Rule even reach a licensed agent?

This question usually gets skipped, and the honest answer is that it depends on facts this page cannot see.

The FTC’s Telemarketing Sales Rule, 16 C.F.R. Part 310, is an FTC rule, and the FTC Act’s reach over “the business of insurance” is limited by the McCarran-Ferguson Act to the extent that business is regulated by state law. The FTC addressed the point directly in Advisory Opinion 03-1. The result is that TSR coverage of insurance telemarketing is a state-by-state jurisdictional question, not a blanket exemption and not a blanket application.

Two things are certain regardless. The FCC’s TCPA rules apply to insurance callers with no such carve-out — gates 1 through 3 above are not in question. And an agent should not be sold a TSR-framed compliance product without first asking whether the TSR reaches their operation at all, and in which states. A state-specific answer to that requires counsel.

That said, the TSR’s recordkeeping schedule is a good template even for an agency outside its reach, because it describes what a regulator thinks a consent record contains. The FTC’s 2024 amendments, published at 89 Fed. Reg. 26760 on April 16, 2024 and effective May 16, 2024 — with compliance for the call-records provision at 16 C.F.R. § 310.5(a)(2) not required until October 15, 2024 — raised the retention period to five years at § 310.5(a) and enumerated what a record of express informed consent must include: the name and telephone number of the person consenting, a copy of the request for consent in the same manner and format in which it was presented, the purpose for which consent was requested, a copy of the consent provided, and the date it was given.

The record set that survives a demand letter

Compliance here is a records outcome, not a software purchase. The only question that matters after the fact is whether an agency can reconstruct, per dial, what consent existed and what list state applied at that moment. Separating what is required from what is merely prudent matters, because blending the two is how a page becomes wrong when a rule moves.

Required by FCC rule (in most of the country; see the Fifth Circuit note above):

• A written internal do-not-call policy, available on demand — 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200(d)(1).
• Training for personnel engaged in telemarketing — § 64.1200(d)(2).
• The internal do-not-call request recorded at the time it is made — § 64.1200(d)(3).
• That request honoured within a reasonable time not exceeding ten business days — § 64.1200(d)(3) — and kept for five years from the date it is made — § 64.1200(d)(6).
• Written procedures, training and records evidencing the registry process, using a registry version no more than 31 days old, for the national DNC safe harbour — § 64.1200(c)(2).
• Revocation honoured within ten business days by any reasonable method, with no exclusive channel designated — § 64.1200(a)(10).

Prudent, and not required by any FCC rule — but this is the set that actually wins a motion:

• The consent artifact as displayed to that specific consumer: the form, the exact disclosure language, the URL, the timestamp, the IP or session identifier.
• The registry version and download date used for that specific dial.
• The internal DNC state of that number at the moment of the call, not today.
• The call detail record: time, duration, disposition, campaign and line.
• Every revocation event, with the timestamp the suppression was actually applied across all channels — not the timestamp it was received.
• Chain of custody: which vendor supplied that number, on what date, under what contract.

Retention floor: the federal limitations period is four years under 28 U.S.C. § 1658(a), internal DNC requests must be honoured for five under § 64.1200(d)(6), and TSR-covered sellers keep records for five under § 310.5(a). Five years is the practical floor. Platform retention defaults are set for storage cost rather than for a limitations period, which makes the default a setting worth reading rather than assuming. The requirement is retrievability by phone number, five years later, by someone who was not there when the call was made. Where that record lives is a CRM question, and a spreadsheet is not an answer to it.

Where this page stops being useful

• It publishes no state-specific figure. Calling windows, per-day caps, state DNC lists and state damages are on the spoke pages, each with a statutory citation and a verification date, because those are the rows secondary sources get wrong most often.
• Circuit matters now. In the Fifth Circuit the FCC’s written-consent requirement was rejected in Bradford; in the Seventh, texts are not “calls” for the private DNC action after Steidinger. Neither is national law, both are being litigated elsewhere, and the FCC’s own enforcement authority is unaffected by either. A programme built to the stricter reading survives a change of venue; one built to the local holding does not.
• Unsettled questions are marked as unsettled, not resolved in the convenient direction. Whether quiet hours apply to consented marketing texts is pending at the FCC. Whether the cross-topic revocation waiver is extended a third time past January 31, 2027 is unknown; it has been extended twice, which is evidence of nothing.
• This is written for an agency running phones. A part-time producer working forty leads a month off a cell phone has a different problem set and probably does not need most of this.
• It is not legal advice. See the block at the bottom, which is not boilerplate we are hiding.

What to change Monday

Ten checkable things. None of them requires buying anything.

1. Open the dialer’s DNC download log and read the date on the most recent registry version. If it is older than seven days, move the cadence to weekly. Monthly leaves one day of margin.
2. Count your campaigns. Each one carries its own 3% denominator over its own 30 days. If you split by lead source, you multiplied your exposure to a pacing mistake.
3. Pull the retention setting for call detail records, dialer logs and SMS logs. If it says 90 days, it is shorter than the four-year limitations period by a factor of sixteen. Change it before you need it, not after.
4. Send a STOP from a number you control and time how long until it is suppressed on every channel and for every agent. Ten business days is the ceiling, not the target.
5. Check the keyword list covers stop, quit, end, cancel, opt out, revoke and unsubscribe, and that no script, landing page or footer tells a consumer that one specific channel is the only way to opt out.
6. Confirm the internal do-not-call list is one list, shared across every agent, every campaign and every channel — and that entries are kept five years, not purged with the lead.
7. Ask whoever would know to produce the written internal do-not-call policy in ten minutes. If nobody can, it does not exist, and § 64.1200(d)(1) requires it to be available on demand.
8. Pick ten leads bought last year at random and ask the vendor for the form as displayed, the timestamp, the IP and the referring URL. The answer, and how fast it comes, is your real compliance posture.
9. Search your E&O policy PDF for the phrase “Telephone Consumer Protection Act” and for “statutory violation.” Whether either is excluded is a question the policy document answers and a broker’s summary usually does not, and reading it during a claim is the expensive way to find out.
10. Write down which vendor supplied each number currently loaded in the dial list. If you cannot, chain of custody is already gone.

Sources

All retrieved 2026-07-29.

• 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200 — FCC implementing rules: (a)(2) written consent, (a)(7) abandonment and the identification message, (a)(10) revocation and the confirmatory message, (c)(1) calling hours, (c)(2) national DNC safe harbour, (d)(1) through (d)(6) internal DNC including the ten-business-day deadline at (d)(3) and the five-year retention at (d)(6), (m) Reassigned Numbers Database safe harbour. Cornell LII text, because eCFR blocks automated retrieval.
• *Insurance Marketing Coalition Ltd. v. FCC*, No. 24-10277 (11th Cir. Jan. 24, 2025) — slip opinion vacating Part III.D of FCC 23-107.
• Federal Register, August 29, 2025 — FCC final rule deleting the vacated one-to-one language.
• *McLaughlin Chiropractic Associates, Inc. v. McKesson Corp.*, 606 U.S. ___ (June 20, 2025) — Hobbs Act does not bind district courts to FCC TCPA interpretations.
• FCC CGB Order DA 26-12 (rel. Jan. 6, 2026) — extends the cross-topic revocation requirement to January 31, 2027.
• Kelley Drye, effective date of the consent-revocation rules — April 11, 2025 effective date and the confirmatory-message conditions.
• Holland & Knight on Bradford v. Sovereign Pest Control of TX and Nixon Peabody on the same decision — the two reports differ on the decision date, which is why none is stated above.
• Troutman Pepper Locke, Steidinger v. Blackstone Medical Services (7th Cir., July 2026) — texts are not “calls” under § 227(c)(5); circuit split.
• Agency Checklists, Ward v. Liberty Mutual class certification (D. Mass., June 12, 2026) — class sizes, the four-company lead chain and the commonality holding.
• FCC 25-76, the Ninth Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (adopted Oct. 28, 2025, released Oct. 29, 2025) — para. 97 on eliminating the abandonment and ring-time rules, paras. 101–103 on amending § 64.1200(a)(10). Read from the item itself; Kelley Drye’s analysis covers the same ground. A proposal, not a rule.
• FCC Declaratory Ruling FCC 24-17 (CG Docket No. 23-362, adopted Feb. 2, 2024, released Feb. 8, 2024) — confirms that the TCPA’s restrictions on artificial or prerecorded voice encompass AI technologies that generate human voices, voice cloning included, so such calls require prior express consent.
• 16 C.F.R. § 310.4 and § 310.5 — TSR abandoned-call provision and the five-year recordkeeping schedule. Amendments at 89 Fed. Reg. 26760 (Apr. 16, 2024), effective May 16, 2024, with § 310.5(a)(2) compliance deferred to October 15, 2024.
• FTC Advisory Opinion 03-1 — McCarran-Ferguson and the TSR’s reach over the business of insurance.
• FTC National Do Not Call Registry Data Book, FY2025 — 258 million-plus actively registered numbers at the end of FY2025; 2.6 million-plus complaints over the same twelve months. Figures read via CompliancePoint’s summary because ftc.gov blocked automated retrieval on the review date, which is why no publication date for the Data Book itself is stated above.
• WebRecon monthly litigation statistics: May 2026 and March 2026 — filing counts, class-action share and year-to-date change.
• 28 U.S.C. § 1658 — the four-year federal catch-all limitations period.
• Federal Register, July 14, 2008 — permanent DNC registration following the Do-Not-Call Improvement Act of 2007.

Claims cut from this page for want of a source we could verify: the frequently repeated figure that insurance leads generate a fixed share of all TCPA cases; the per-class-member settlement ranges that circulate on settlement-aggregator sites; typical single-plaintiff settlement and TCPA defence-cost figures; and the Federal Register publication date for FCC 25-76. None traced to a docket, a statute or a published survey on the review date, so none appears above. The decision date for Bradford is likewise absent because two law-firm reports of it disagree, and every per-state figure is absent by design. Who publishes this page, and why that matters, is on about InsuraCentral.

This is not legal advice, and we are not your lawyers.

This site is published by Cranfer Technologies LLC, the company that also builds InsuraCentral. We write about the TCPA, Do Not Call rules and carrier messaging requirements because they decide how our readers make a living — not because we are qualified to tell you what to do about them. We are not a law firm. Nothing on this page creates an attorney-client relationship, and nothing here is a substitute for advice from counsel who knows your business and the states you call into.

Telemarketing law is moving faster than most published guidance, and it is no longer uniform. Since 2024, federal courts have stopped treating the FCC’s rulebook as the final word: Loper Bright ended automatic deference to agency interpretations, McLaughlin Chiropractic Associates v. McKesson (U.S. 2025) held that district courts are not bound by the FCC’s reading of the TCPA, and federal appellate courts have since split on questions as basic as whether consent must be in writing and whether a text message counts as a “call.” A rule that is settled in one circuit may be the opposite one state over. On top of that, more than fifteen states now have their own telemarketing statutes that are stricter than federal law, and many of them define “automated dialing” broadly enough to cover equipment that is perfectly lawful under the federal standard.

This page was last reviewed on the date shown at the top and describes our understanding of the rules as of that date only. We re-check our compliance pages on a schedule, but we do not update every page every time the law moves. If that date is more than six months old, assume something has changed.

One more thing worth being blunt about: carrier requirements are not law, and law is not a carrier requirement. A2P 10DLC registration is administered by the mobile carriers, not by the FCC, and being registered and approved gives you no protection whatsoever under the TCPA. Software — ours included — can scrub a list, store a consent record, log an opt-out and register a campaign. It cannot create consent that a consumer never gave, and it cannot repair a lead source that was bad before you bought it.

Before you change how your agency dials, texts, buys leads or records consent, talk to a licensed attorney who practices telemarketing and TCPA law in the states you call. That conversation costs a fraction of one certified class action, and the agents who skip it are the ones who fund the plaintiffs’ bar.