The FCC Voted on 30 September to Rewrite Its Robocall Opt-Out Rules. Here Is What a Sales Team Calling and Texting Business Owners Still Owes Under the TCPA.

A lot of merchant-services selling starts with a call or a text to a business owner, and the number on the lead is often the owner's mobile. That puts a good share of an ISO's outbound work inside the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, the 1991 federal law that lets the person called sue for statutory damages: $500 for each unlawful robocall or robotext, which a court can raise to as much as three times that if it finds the violation was willful or knowing.

On 30 September 2026 the FCC voted on an order rewriting how callers must handle a request to stop. The adopted text had not been released when this was written, so the section on the vote describes the draft order the Commission published on 9 September, which can change before release. This piece covers the federal rules only, as they stand on 30 September 2026, and is not legal advice.

Which Calls and Texts the Rules Reach

The TCPA works through two sets of rules with different triggers, and an outbound sales team is usually inside both.

• Robocalls and robotexts to mobile numbers. The statute bars calls to any number assigned to a cellular telephone service made with an automatic telephone dialing system or an artificial or prerecorded voice, unless the called party gave prior express consent. The FCC applies the rule to texts sent with an autodialer as well as to voice calls. Nothing in the rule turns on whether the phone belongs to a business. If the call or text is telemarketing, the FCC's rule requires prior express written consent.
• Telephone solicitations to residential subscribers. These carry the national Do-Not-Call registry, the 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. calling window measured at the called party's location, and the obligation to keep a company-specific do-not-call list. None of these depends on how the number was dialled.

Two limits narrow these rules. For the first set, the Supreme Court held in Facebook v. Duguid (April 2021) that a device is an autodialer only if it has the capacity to store or produce telephone numbers using a random or sequential number generator. Whether a given dialer or texting platform meets that test depends on how it works, so it is a question to put to the vendor rather than assume. The ruling did not touch artificial or prerecorded voice: a call that plays a recorded message to a mobile number needs consent however it was dialled.

The second set, the do-not-call rules, protects residential subscribers, not businesses. But when the FCC opened the national registry to mobile numbers in 2003, it said it would presume that wireless subscribers who register are residential, because deciding whether a particular wireless subscriber is residential may be more fact-intensive than for a landline. An owner's personal mobile that doubles as the shop's number is where that question arises. Since McLaughlin Chiropractic v. McKesson (June 2025), district courts decide for themselves what the statute means, giving the FCC's reading appropriate respect rather than treating it as binding, so a court hearing a private suit is not bound to follow the FCC's presumption.

Business-to-business calls are largely exempt from the FTC's Telemarketing Sales Rule, but since May 2024 the exemption no longer covers the rule's ban on misrepresenting material information, including the total cost of the goods or services, or its ban on false or misleading statements made to induce payment. A sales call that misstates processing costs is inside the rule even when the person called is a business.

The Opt-Out Rules in Force Today

The FCC's 2024 order on revoking consent took effect on 11 April 2025. For calls and texts that need consent, it requires the following.

• A person may revoke consent by any reasonable method, and the caller may not designate an exclusive way to do it.
• Replying "stop", "quit", "end", "revoke", "opt out", "cancel" or "unsubscribe" to a text is a valid revocation. A reply in other words also counts if a reasonable person would understand it as a request to stop.
• Using an automated opt-out on a call, or a website or phone number the caller has designated for opt-outs, is also a valid revocation. Other methods, such as a voicemail or an email, create a rebuttable presumption that consent was revoked.
• Revocations must be honoured within a reasonable time, and no later than ten business days after receipt.
• One confirmation text is allowed if it only confirms the request and carries no marketing. Sent within five minutes, it is presumed to fall within the person's consent.
• A sender whose texting system cannot receive replies must say so in each text and give other ways to opt out.

One part of the 2024 order has never taken effect. As written, it would make a revocation sent in reply to one type of message stop all robocalls and robotexts from the caller, including ones on unrelated matters. The FCC's consumer bureau postponed that part to 11 April 2026, then in January 2026 pushed it to 31 January 2027 while the Commission reconsidered it.

The company-specific do-not-call rules sit alongside this. A business that makes telemarketing calls to residential subscribers must have a written do-not-call policy, train the people who make the calls, record a request at the time it is made, honour it within ten business days and keep it for five years. A business that wants the safe harbour for an accidental call to a number on the national registry must, among other things, check numbers against a version of the registry no more than 31 days old.

What the 30 September Vote Changes

The draft order makes three changes that matter to a sales team.

• Callers may designate an exclusive way to revoke consent, choosing one or more of three methods: an automated voice or key-press opt-out on the call, a reply using one of the seven standard words, or a website or phone number set up to process opt-outs. The designated method must be disclosed clearly and conspicuously on the call or in the text. A caller that designates none must keep honouring any reasonable method.
• Revocation of informational messages, those with no advertising or telemarketing, can be treated as covering only the category the person replied to. A "stop" to payment reminders need not stop fraud alerts.
• Marketing is treated as one category. A revocation sent in response to a telemarketing call or text revokes consent to all future telemarketing calls and texts from that caller.

The ten-business-day deadline stays. The draft also asks for comment on revisiting that period, requiring two-way texting, requiring a single method to revoke consent to everything, and how revocations should apply to affiliates. On the draft's text, the order does not change the consent requirements themselves, the do-not-call rules, the calling-hours window or the Telemarketing Sales Rule. Until the adopted rules take effect, the current opt-out rules above still apply.

What a Sales Team Should Check

• List every tool that places calls or sends texts, including the CRM's texting feature, any dialer and any voicemail tool. For each, record whether it uses a prerecorded or artificial voice and how it selects and dials numbers, and get the vendor's answer in writing.
• Record consent for each number: where and when it was given and the exact wording. For marketing by autodialer or prerecorded voice, that means a written agreement signed by the person called, electronically if need be, that names the number and clearly authorises the seller to call. It must disclose that signing authorises those calls and is not a condition of purchase.
• For autodialed or prerecorded marketing, consent on a bought lead counts only if it authorises your business. The FCC's attempt to limit each consent to a single seller was vacated by the Eleventh Circuit in January 2025, but the definition still requires the agreement to authorise the seller making the call.
• Make a stop reach every system that can call or text the number, and every rep, within ten business days. Under the draft order a marketing opt-out covers all marketing from your business, so another rep or campaign should not pick the number back up.
• If you plan to rely on an exclusive opt-out method once the new rules apply, build the disclosure into every script and every message template now.
• Before cold-calling a mobile number, check it against the national registry, using a copy no more than 31 days old, and against your own do-not-call list.
• Schedule calls and texts between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m. in the merchant's time zone, not the office's.
• Script pricing statements and check them against the merchant agreement. The Telemarketing Sales Rule's ban on misrepresenting costs applies to calls to businesses.

Some states, Florida among them, have their own telephone-solicitation statutes with their own definitions and scope, and none of that is covered here. The federal pieces are mostly record-keeping: where consent came from, how a stop request travels through every system, and which tools fall within the rules. That is easier to put in order before a demand letter than after one.