The law applies to business texting on every channel, and the penalties are per message, which makes compliance an economic discipline rather than a legal formality. These guides translate the TCPA, the FCC's 2025 revocation rules, state statutes and HIPAA into operator language: what consent basis you need, how fast opt-outs must be honored, what records to keep, and where the real lawsuits come from. None of it is legal advice; all of it is what to ask counsel about.
21 guides
Daniel Human filed more than 65 suits in a year. Fisher Investments refused to settle, and on 30 September 2026 a federal judge made Human and his lawyer jointly liable for its defense fees. The evidence that mattered sat on the plaintiff side, which is why your own lead record has to carry the rest.
On 24 September 2026 a federal judge in Orlando ruled that 47 USC 227(c)(5) gives no private right of action for the National Do Not Call Registry rule, because the FCC wrote it 11 years after Congress's deadline. The claim over the company's own do-not-call list was left open to replead.
An insurance administrator received a car buyer's details through a dealership's portal, then texted her an Allstate-brand insurance offer. On 22 September 2026 a California federal judge refused to dismiss the case on its established business relationship defense: the buyer dealt with the dealer, not the company that texted her.
On 1 October 2026 a Massachusetts federal judge refused Liberty Mutual summary judgment on the TCPA safe harbor in a 7,092-person Do Not Call class. Its one filed policy missed what it claimed, and its training proof was cursory. Five months earlier, American Home Shield won the same defense on paper.
A House bill introduced on 24 September 2026 would revive the FCC's one-seller, topic-matched consent definition. Seven months earlier the Fifth Circuit held the TCPA never required written consent at all. Here is what each one actually changes.
A voice memo is the most human thing a sales team can put in a thread, and also the one piece of a text that can carry a prerecorded voice. The Ninth Circuit drew a line in January 2026. It fits some memos and not others.
On 1 October 2026 a Virginia federal court held that a cell phone is not a residential line under the TCPA's do-not-call section. The next day a Michigan court threw out a claim because the number was a business line when it was registered. Both rulings matter to anyone texting work cells, and neither is a license.
Texas pulled sales texts into its telemarketer registration law on September 1, 2025, then settled a lawsuit by exempting opt-in texting. Cold B2B outreach sits outside that deal. Here is what the statute asks of you, read from the code itself.
Canada is a stronger iPhone market than the US, and its anti-spam law reaches every sales text a Canadian opens. CASL starts from a ban, then opens four doors. Here is what each one demands, read from the statute itself.
Pennsylvania rewrote its telemarketing law for the first time since 1996, and texts are now inside it. The change most teams will miss sits in one deleted line: a lead who asked you to get in touch is no longer exempt. Only a four-part signed consent is.
The FCC adopted its TCPA opt-out rewrite on 30 September 2026 and released it on 1 October as FCC 26-67. Most of the 9 September draft survived. Two lines changed, and both matter to anyone texting a pipeline: the disclosure can now be a single word, and the FCC refused to give senders a year to comply.
Three federal district courts held in the past three weeks that a text message is not a telephone call under the TCPA provision that lets a consumer sue over do-not-call violations. The rulings are real and they are spreading. They also remove one claim out of five, in some places, while the FCC spent the same month tightening the rule that governs every message you send.
Every compliance checklist in B2B texting tells you to honor an opt-out. Almost none of them ask the next question, which is where the evidence of that opt-out lives, who deletes it, and on what schedule. The answer is usually a vendor dashboard with a retention window measured in months, sitting under a legal duty measured in years.
Every outbound team knows what to do when a reply says stop. The contact gets suppressed, the sequence halts, somebody logs it. What almost nobody has decided on purpose is how wide that stop goes: one line or all of them, one brand or the whole company, your own record or the agency's. Federal rule text answers all three, and one of the answers turns on something most senders treat as a style choice.
Every dead-lead campaign runs against a list somebody built a while ago, and phone numbers do not sit still. A number that a prospect gave you eighteen months ago can belong to a different person today, with the same area code, the same formatting, and no signal in your CRM that anything changed. The first personalized text you send lands on a stranger.
CMS switches on its contract year 2027 marketing rules on 1 October 2026, two weeks before the Annual Election Period opens. The rule most agents know about is the 48-hour Scope of Appointment wait, which is gone. The two that change a text thread got almost no attention. Read from the Federal Register final rule on 15 September 2026.
The FCC circulated a draft Report and Order on 9 September 2026 that reverses the opt-out rule in force since April 2025. Senders could designate one exclusive revocation method, the 31 January 2027 revoke-all date would never arrive, and a companion notice asks whether reply-text opt-out should become mandatory. Read from the FCC draft on 12 September 2026.
A whole compliance category rests on one sentence the FCC wrote in June 2020: a platform that cannot send without a person manually dialing each number is not an autodialer. On 4 September 2026 the Bureau put a petition out for comment asking it to say the opposite when the human is only there to click a button. Nothing has been decided, and the deadline that matters is 5 October.
A plain-language walk through HIPAA for teams that want to text: who the law covers, what counts as PHI, what a business associate agreement is, which messages are safe because they carry no health information at all, and where the do-not-guess line sits.
What a B2B texting program actually has to build to stay inside the TCPA in 2026, from consent capture through the 10-business-day revocation clock, logging, and per-message damages exposure.
A sourced, honest walkthrough of the TCPA, FCC consent rules, state mini-TCPA statutes, and Apple's terms, plus a compliance checklist for B2B outbound teams.
