TCPA Quiet Hours: When You May Call or Text, by the Recipient's Clock

The table gives the windows we confirmed in the published rule or statute. For Texas, the hours come from a chapter of the Business and Commerce Code that predates the state's 2025 texting law. Kelley Drye notes that the chapter does not define the consumer telephone calls it covers and says it would be reasonable to apply it to telemarketing texts.

Other states have their own windows. We did not open their statutes for this post, so they are not in the table.

The rule is the first paragraph of the FCC's Do Not Call regulation, 47 CFR 64.1200(c)(1). It sits beside the National Do Not Call Registry rule and is enforced the same way. Paragraph (e) of the same section says the rules in paragraphs (c) and (d) apply to telephone solicitations and telemarketing calls or text messages to wireless numbers.

Three phrases set its reach. Telephone solicitation is a defined term: a call or message made to encourage the purchase or rental of, or investment in, property, goods or services. Residential telephone subscriber describes who is protected. Local time at the called party's location fixes the clock.

The Federal Trade Commission has a parallel rule for telemarketing. Under the Telemarketing Sales Rule, it is an abusive practice to call a person's residence outside 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. local time at the called person's location without the person's prior consent. The FTC's rule text we read does not mention text messages.

A text sent at 6 a.m. is quieter than a ringing phone. The FCC's rule draws no distinction. Paragraph (e) extends the calling-hours rule to text messages in so many words.

The litigation followed. The petition filed with the FCC in March 2025 said about ninety quiet-hours lawsuits had been filed between November 2024 and March 2025, according to summaries of the petition. Klein Moynihan Turco, summarizing the petition, says one firm had filed more than 90 nearly identical cases since November 2024.

The argument is textual. The quiet-hours rule restricts telephone solicitations. Both the statute and the FCC's rule define that term to exclude a call or message to any person with that person's prior express invitation or permission. If a customer invited the texts, the reasoning goes, the texts are not telephone solicitations and the hours rule never applies to them.

On 30 April 2026 a federal court accepted that reasoning. In King v. Bon Charge, in the District of Delaware, Judge Stephanos Bibas, a Third Circuit judge sitting by designation, dismissed a quiet-hours claim brought by a person who had texted a keyword to subscribe and receive a discount code. According to Nixon Peabody's summary, the court relied on the phone records attached to the plaintiff's own complaint and noted that the quiet-hours rule, unlike the registry rule, does not call for a signed written agreement. The same court let the plaintiff's National Do Not Call claim go forward.

Nixon Peabody is careful about the limits. It is one district court decision, it binds no other court, and the firm expects courts to diverge. Some may find that general marketing consent does not extend to contact at any hour.

The FCC has been asked to decide. On 11 March 2025 its Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau issued a public notice, DA 25-216, seeking comment on a petition from the Ecommerce Innovation Alliance and others. Comments were due 10 April 2025 and replies 25 April 2025. We found no ruling on the petition as of 12 November 2026.

People keep their numbers when they move. A phone with a New York area code may be in Arizona, where it is two or three hours earlier. The rule is written around the person's location, which the sender often cannot see.

The petition before the FCC shows how unsettled this is. Besides the consent question, the public notice says the petitioners asked for a waiver of the calling-hours rule for solicitations to wireless numbers or, in the alternative, a clarification that the area code and exchange are presumed to indicate the called party's location. The FCC has granted neither request.

Without a ruling, senders use what they have. The list below describes the common approaches. None of them is a safe harbor written into the rule.

• Use the mailing or billing address on file when there is one, and fall back to the area code when there is not
• Where the address and the area code point to different time zones, send only in the hours that are permitted in both
• Keep a note of which basis was used for each person, so the choice can be shown later
• Hold a narrower national window for sends where the location is unknown. Nixon Peabody gives 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Eastern as an example of a conservative window
• Apply the state window when the recipient is in a state with shorter hours

The federal statute does not preempt a state law that sets more restrictive intrastate rules for telephone solicitations, so the state windows stack on top of the federal one. A message has to fit inside both.

Florida's telemarketing act says a commercial telephone seller or salesperson may not make a commercial telephone solicitation phone call before 8 a.m. or after 8 p.m. local time in the called person's time zone. The same subsection limits a seller to three such calls to a person in 24 hours on the same subject, whatever number is used. That subsection speaks of phone calls, and the page we read does not say whether a text counts as one.

Oregon's 2025 law, chapter 580, adds text messages to the definition of telephone solicitation and makes it unlawful to initiate a solicitation outside the hours of 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. or more than three times in 24 hours. The chaptered text carves out a person with an established business relationship.

Pennsylvania's Act 47 of 2026 replaced an 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. window with a tighter one. It prohibits initiating a telephone solicitation on a Sunday, after 7 p.m. or before 9 a.m., and separately on a legal holiday. The act covers telephone solicitation text messages and takes effect 90 days after enactment. Our research notes record that it was signed on 20 July 2026, which puts the effective date at 18 October 2026, and one source says 19 October.

The calling-hours rule is part of the FCC's Do Not Call regulation, so private suits over it use 47 U.S.C. 227(c)(5). That section lets a person sue who has received more than one telephone call within any twelve-month period by or on behalf of the same entity in violation of the regulations. The amount is up to 500 dollars per violation, and a court may award up to three times that for a willful or knowing violation.

Two features of that section matter here. A single late message is not enough, because the statute requires more than one. And the section includes an affirmative defense for a business that has established and implemented, with due care, reasonable practices and procedures to prevent violations.

A third feature arrived in July 2026. The Seventh Circuit held in Steidinger v. Blackstone Medical Services that a text message is not a telephone call under 227(c)(5). The opinion did not discuss quiet hours by name. Our reading is that it reaches quiet-hours claims over texts in Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin, because those claims rely on the same section. Courts in other parts of the country have gone both ways on the underlying question, and state laws are unaffected.

A quiet-hours claim is a claim about a timestamp. The business that can show what time it was for the recipient, and why it believed that, is in a different position from one that can only show its own server time.

The record does not need to be elaborate. The points below follow from the rule's wording and from the defenses discussed in the King decision. They are our reading of what a careful sender keeps, and they are not a checklist from any regulator.

• The send time in UTC and the recipient-local time it was converted to
• The time zone assigned to the person and whether it came from an address or an area code
• The window applied: federal, or a named state rule
• How the person joined the list, with the date, since consent is the basis of the King reasoning