Courts Keep Ruling Texts Are Not Calls. Read the Map Before You Relax.

What the rulings actually say#

Section 227(c)(5) of the TCPA gives a private right of action to a person who has received more than one telephone call within a 12-month period in violation of the do-not-call regulations.

A run of federal courts has now read that phrase literally. The statute says telephone call, it does not say message, and the word message appears elsewhere in the same law where Congress wanted it.

Three of those rulings landed in the past three weeks, which is why the question is suddenly live for anyone running outbound text.

• Card v. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Holdings, Inc., 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 201636 (M.D.N.C. 3 September 2026): Judge Catherine Eagles dismissed a putative class action because text messages do not fall within the private right of action created by section 227(c)(5). First district court in the Fourth Circuit to so hold.
• Conrad v. Hart Consumer Products, 2026 WL 2741623 (N.D. Ala. 16 September 2026): same conclusion, first time in Alabama. The court closed with a line worth reading twice, that until Congress broadens the right of action to the receipt of text messages, the plaintiff has no personal right of action in that court.
• Steidinger v. Blackstone Medical Services, 182 F.4th 532 (7th Cir. 2026) is still the only appellate decision on point, and it binds Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin.
• Card is the decision that named the reasoning most cleanly: Congress could have written call, as it did in section 227(b), and instead wrote telephone call in section 227(c)(5) (blogs.duanemorris.com, read 22 September 2026).

The map, circuit by circuit#

Where you send from and where your prospect picks up now decide whether this claim exists at all. That is an uncomfortable sentence to write about a federal statute, and it is the current state of play.

Six circuits have at least one district court holding that texts fall outside section 227(c)(5). Four circuits have district courts going the other way, with no decisions for defendants in those four.

The Ninth is the odd one out: no appellate ruling on 227(c)(5), and a Los Angeles court held texts are calls on 2 October 2026.

• Chart assembled from the circuit table published by Duane Morris on 9 September 2026 (blogs.duanemorris.com, read 22 September 2026), updated with Conrad v. Hart (16 Sep), Radvansky (23 Sep), Lowrey (1 Oct) and Combs (2 Oct 2026).
• The Ninth Circuit entry is the one most people get wrong. Howard is widely treated as settling the question, but it was decided under section 227(b)(3), which uses the broader word call, so Card suggests daylight remains for 227(c)(5).
• A district court decision binds nobody outside that district. Six circuits with a favorable district decision is not six circuits of protection.
• Several of these are on appeal. The Eleventh and Seventh Circuits are the ones to watch, and an appellate split is how this reaches the Supreme Court.
• A second question now runs alongside this one: whether a cell phone is a residential line at all. Lowrey said no on 1 October 2026; the rulings are at /blog/cell-phone-residential-subscriber-dnc-rulings.

Why this is happening now, and not in 2019#

For years, most courts assumed section 227(c)(5) covered texts, and they assumed it because the FCC said so. Judge Eagles said as much in Card.

McLaughlin Chiropractic Associates, Inc. v. McKesson Corporation, 606 U.S. 146 (2025) changed the standard for judicial deference to an agency's reading of a statute.

Every text-is-a-call decision that rested on FCC interpretation rather than statutory text became arguable overnight. That is the engine behind the 2026 run of rulings.

• Card holds that post-McKesson, prior cases relying on the FCC's interpretation are no longer good law on this point (blogs.duanemorris.com, read 22 September 2026).
• The courts going the other way use a fair argument, made in Taha v. Momentive Software, 2026 WL 974297 (C.D. Cal. 11 March 2026): if Congress meant to exclude text it would have written voice call.
• Card answers that the inverse is equally true, since Congress used the plain word call in section 227(b) and the narrower telephone call in section 227(c)(5).
• None of this is about whether texting people is acceptable. It is about which sentence of a 1991 statute a private plaintiff can sue under.

Five exposures none of these rulings touched#

Read the headlines and the takeaway sounds like open season. Read the opinions and the win is narrow, because section 227(c)(5) is one claim among several.

Duane Morris, writing for corporate defendants, put it plainly on 9 September 2026: we are not yet at the stage where companies can consider revising their text messaging programs.

Here is what survives every one of these decisions, unchanged.

• Section 227(b) liability. The autodialer and prerecorded-message provision uses the broader word call, and Howard v. Republican National Committee (9th Cir. 2026) read it to reach texts. Nothing in Card, Conrad or Steidinger disturbs it.
• State mini-TCPA statutes. Florida, Oklahoma, Washington and others define their own automated systems, carry their own damages, and have their own private rights of action. A federal ruling on section 227(c)(5) does not reach any of them.
• FCC enforcement. The do-not-call regulations at 47 CFR 64.1200 still bind you whether or not a private plaintiff can sue. Losing the private claim removes the plaintiff, not the rule.
• Statutory damages elsewhere in the same statute: $500 per violation, trebled to $1,500 when willful (troutman.com, read 22 September 2026). Per message, across a list, that arithmetic has not moved.
• Platform and carrier terms, which are contract questions rather than TCPA questions, and which get enforced by suspension rather than by lawsuit.

The FCC moved the other way in the same month#

On 30 September 2026 the FCC adopted FCC 26-67 (circulated as draft FCC-CIRC 2609-05 on 9 September), rewriting the consent-revocation rules that were due to take effect on 31 January 2027.

The new rules take effect 30 days after Federal Register publication, which supersedes the January date entirely and shortens the runway most compliance teams had planned around.

So the month that narrowed one private claim also tightened the operating rule that governs every send. Those two facts belong in the same sentence.

• Callers may now designate one exclusive revocation channel from three options, and if it is disclosed clearly and conspicuously, revocations sent another way need not be processed (troutman.com, read 22 September 2026).
• Revocation of informational messages can be treated as category-specific. Revocation of telemarketing still kills all future telemarketing from that caller, with no category carve-out.
• The companion proposal asks about cutting the honoring window from 10 business days to 7, requiring two-way texting capability, and trimming the standardized opt-out keyword list.
• Our breakdown of the exclusive-opt-out mechanics sits at /blog/fcc-exclusive-opt-out-method-draft-order, written when the order was still a draft.

What a sales team should actually change#

Nothing about your opt-out handling, and quite a lot about how you read risk coverage from a vendor.

The teams that get hurt by a development like this are the ones that treat a narrowing claim as permission, loosen their process, and then meet a section 227(b) claim or a state statute that never moved.

Three changes are worth making this quarter.

• Classify every campaign as informational or telemarketing before the FCC rule takes effect, and treat anything with promotional content as telemarketing. The classification decides which revocation scope applies to it.
• Stop treating jurisdiction as a compliance variable. You do not control which district your prospect sues in, and four circuits have district courts that still allow the claim.
• Audit where your suppression record lives, because the rule that survived all of these decisions is the record-keeping duty under 47 CFR 64.1200(d)(6), and it runs five years.
• If a vendor markets any of this as reduced legal risk, ask them to put the circuit and the claim in writing. The honest answer is one claim, in some districts, on appeal.

Where Blue Reacher sits in this#

Blue Reacher sends over iMessage, so no A2P registration is required and no carrier campaign record exists. That is a carrier-registration fact, and it says nothing about consent law.

Consent law applies to the channel exactly as written. The TCPA, the FCC revocation rules and every state statute reach a message regardless of which pipe carried it.

The part we can affect is where the evidence lives, and messages send from your CRM, so replies and opt-outs land on the contact record in a database you already own.

• Pacing is published rather than negotiated: no total daily message cap, replies are never metered, and new conversations pace at 50 opted-in or 30 cold new contacts per line per day.
• A suppression record on the contact record in your CRM outlives any vendor subscription, which matters more once you have read how short vendor retention windows run: /blog/who-keeps-your-opt-out-record.
• We are a vendor in this category and say so on every page. Nothing here is legal advice, and the citations are dated so your counsel can check each one.
• Opt-out handling is documented rather than described in a sales call: /features/opt-out-handling sets out how a revocation is recognized and applied.

A five-minute check on your own program#

Run these five questions against your current setup. Each one is answerable today without a lawyer, and each one points at a gap that section 227(c)(5) news does not close.

Write the answers down with a date. That habit is what turns a compliance posture into evidence.

Anything you cannot answer is the thing to fix first.

• Which of your campaigns would a regulator call telemarketing, and does your opt-out scope match that classification?
• How many business days pass between a reply that reads like an opt-out and the moment that contact stops receiving messages?
• If your sending vendor disappeared tomorrow, could you produce a five-year do-not-call record from a system you control?
• Which states do your lists actually reach, and have you checked those state statutes rather than only the federal one?
• Has anyone on your team quoted a favorable court ruling as a reason to send more? That conversation is the leading indicator of a problem.

Frequently asked questions