Autodialer compliance is rarely decided by your dialer. Four things decide it: the consent you hold for each number, how recently the list was scrubbed, how the dialer behaves in the two seconds after someone answers, and which states your prospects live in. Federal law stopped treating most list-based dialers as autodialers in 2021.
In This Article
Most teams audit the wrong thing first. They ask a vendor whether the platform is an autodialer, get a reassuring answer, and launch. The answer is correct and insufficient. What follows is the order these decisions have to be made in, from the definition question through to the records you will want on hand when someone asks you to prove any of it. If you would rather have someone walk your existing setup than read about it, that is what the TCPA compliance consulting service page describes, including what a campaign audit covers and how an engagement runs.
Is your dialer actually an autodialer under the TCPA?
Federal law says no for most dialers running today. The TCPA defines an automatic telephone dialing system as equipment with the capacity to store or produce telephone numbers using a random or sequential number generator, and to dial them. That definition sits in the FCC’s delivery restrictions at 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200(f)(2), alongside the consent and calling rules built on top of it. In Facebook v. Duguid (2021) a unanimous Supreme Court held that the number generator carries the whole definition. Dialing from a list you supplied does not qualify, and federal courts have applied it that way since.
Volume is climbing while the autodialer theory narrows. WebRecon’s monthly count of federal consumer-protection filings put TCPA suits at 1,532 for the first half of 2026, up 34.3 percent year over year. What has changed is which theories survive a motion to dismiss. In Ksiazkiewicz v. Woods Basement Systems (E.D. Mo., August 2026), the plaintiff pointed to rotating caller IDs and a click-and-pause delay before an agent picked up. The court required an allegation that the system generates the numbers it dials, not merely that it dials numbers already in hand, and dismissed the claim.
The appellate courts have converged rather than split. In Soliman v. Subway Franchisee Advertising Fund Trust (2d Cir., May 2024) the Second Circuit joined the Ninth in holding that a device that selects and dials from a stored list is not an autodialer.
Two things still keep this from being a clean win. The FCC opened a proceeding in 2021 to revisit its own autodialer rules after Duguid and has not closed it. And in McLaughlin Chiropractic Associates v. McKesson (June 2025) the Supreme Court held 6 to 3 that district courts in private enforcement suits are not bound by the FCC’s reading of the TCPA, and must interpret the statute themselves. Agency guidance is persuasive now, not controlling. The practical effect is that a definitional question you thought was settled by an FCC order can be reopened in any district where you are sued.
“We are not an ATDS” is a defense, not a compliance program. It is also a claim you have to substantiate on demand, which means getting your vendor’s description of the platform’s number-generation capability in writing before launch rather than after a complaint. Nothing that follows depends on the answer.
What consent does a predictive dialer campaign need before it calls a cell phone?
What plays when the call connects sets the consent tier. Marketing calls to a wireless number placed with an autodialer or a prerecorded voice require prior express written consent. That tier is set at § 64.1200(a)(2), which covers autodialed and prerecorded marketing calls to wireless numbers. A live agent dialing manually sits under a lower bar.
Prior express written consent is a defined term, and the definition is where campaigns come apart. It takes four things. A written agreement bearing the signature of the person called, authorizing that specific seller by name, naming the number, and disclosing clearly that signing is not a condition of buying anything. A consent checkbox bundled into terms of purchase fails that last requirement. It fails it for every record the form collected, which is how one lead-capture design becomes a class-sized problem.
Check which exemption a business-to-business campaign actually relies on. The Telemarketing Sales Rule exempts calls between a telemarketer and a business to induce that business to buy, an exemption that sits in the FTC’s list at 16 C.F.R. § 310.6(b)(7) alongside the misrepresentation provisions it does not cover. That is an FTC exemption from the FTC’s rule. It does not touch the TCPA, and the cell phone in your B2B prospect’s pocket is a wireless number like any other.
Consent has to live at the record level, tied to the number, with the artifact attached. On campaigns that survive audit the disclaimer capturing verbal opt-in is scripted word for word, deviation is scored as an automatic fail, and opt-in and opt-out status is written back to the contact record on every call. Checking whether a consent file would hold up is the first thing a campaign compliance audit looks at, alongside script enforcement and scrub cadence.
What has to happen to your list before the dialer touches it?
Scrubbing is a pre-dial step, and the rule sets the clock. The national Do Not Call safe harbor requires a version of the registry obtained no more than 31 days before any call is made. That condition sits at § 64.1200(c)(2)(i)(D), alongside the written procedures and records you need to rely on it. Thirty-one days is the outer edge, not a cadence. A list built in week one and dialed in week six has aged past it.
Your internal suppression list runs on a different clock and a longer memory. A do-not-call request has to be honored within a reasonable time not exceeding ten business days, and the record kept for five years. Numbers also get reassigned between the day consent was collected and the day you dial. That is what the Reassigned Numbers Database answers, and querying it unlocks the safe harbor for a call to a number that changed hands.
The failure mode is rarely a missing scrub. It is a scrub that happened and was not recorded, or a disposition an agent logged that never reached the suppression file before the next session. Campaigns that hold up under audit are the ones where do-not-call, wrong-number and disconnected dispositions drive removal automatically rather than through a weekly export.
How do dialers support TCPA compliance in the way they are configured?
Four settings do most of the work: abandonment rate, connect time, ring duration and calling hours. All four live in the dialer, and all four are auditable after the fact.
Two seconds. That is the window between a completed greeting and a live agent before the call counts as abandoned.
The abandonment rule caps abandoned calls at three percent of calls answered live by a person, measured over each 30-day period of a single campaign, with abandonment defined by that two-second window. The full text at § 64.1200(a)(7) sets out the cap, the measurement period and the identification and opt-out message required when no agent is available. The FTC’s parallel safe harbor at 16 C.F.R. § 310.4(b)(4) runs on the same three percent cap and adds the ring-duration requirement and the record-keeping condition. Pacing algorithms optimize for contact rate by default. Three percent is the number that has to win. The common failure is not a reckless setting: a campaign tuned for answer rate drifts past the cap in week three, and because the measurement window is the full 30 days, nobody sees it until the period closes.
When no agent is available inside that window, a recorded message has to play. The rule specifies its contents. It discloses that the call was for telemarketing purposes and names the business on whose behalf it was placed. It gives a number that takes a do-not-call request during business hours, for the duration of the campaign. It pairs with an automated opt-out mechanism that writes the number to your suppression list and ends the call.
Two smaller settings round it out. Unanswered calls have to ring for at least fifteen seconds or four rings before disconnecting. Calling hours run 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. local time at the called person’s location, not yours, which becomes a dialer configuration question the moment your list crosses a time zone.
Sample abandoned-call identification message
Adapt this to your own entity name and opt-out number. It is a starting point, not legal advice, and it needs to match the opt-out mechanism your dialer actually presents.
“This call was for telemarketing purposes on behalf of [SELLER LEGAL NAME]. To be added to our do-not-call list, press 1 now, or call [TOLL-FREE NUMBER] during business hours.”
What does TCPA consent revocation require your dialer to do?
Treat any reasonable expression of “stop” as valid, and act within ten business days. The revocation rule at § 64.1200(a)(10) sets that deadline and bars designating an exclusive opt-out channel. It also names the words that count automatically in a reply text: stop, quit, end, revoke, opt out, cancel and unsubscribe. Other wording counts where a reasonable person would read it as a revocation. One confirmation text is permitted, and it falls inside existing consent when it goes out within five minutes carrying no marketing.
One constraint is about to be contested: callers may not designate an exclusive means of revoking consent. If someone tells your agent to stop, routing them to a web form is not compliance. The safeguard is one suppression path: an agent-heard revocation, a texted STOP and a web-form submission all land in the same list, each stamped with the time it arrived and the time it took effect.
That is the piece in motion. The broader “revoke all” provision, under which one opt-out would have applied across unrelated call types from the same caller, has been waived twice and currently sits at January 31, 2027. On September 9, 2026 the FCC circulated a draft order that would rewrite the framework instead: narrowing informational opt-outs to the category they were made in, and allowing callers to designate one clearly disclosed revocation channel. It was scheduled for a vote at the Commission’s September 30, 2026 open meeting, with revised rules taking effect thirty days after Federal Register publication.
State autodialer definitions that reach further than the federal test
The divergence that matters sits at state level, not between the circuits. Several states answered the federal narrowing with their own telemarketing statutes and broader triggers, and those statutes follow the prospect rather than your office. Your autodialer compliance obligation is set by the strictest statute among the states you call into. Read Fla. Stat. § 501.059, the Florida Telephone Solicitation Act, for the model the other states followed: calling window, per-subject attempt caps and a private right of action.
State | Statute | Reaches beyond the federal test by | What it changes operationally |
|---|---|---|---|
Florida | Fla. Stat. § 501.059 | Covering systems able to automatically dial or select records to be dialed | Most power, preview and click-to-call setups are in scope; calling window and per-subject attempt caps apply |
Oklahoma | 15 O.S. §§ 775C.1–775C.6 | Closely tracking the Florida formulation | Treat Oklahoma numbers on Florida settings |
Maryland | Md. Com. Law §§ 14-4501–14-4503 | Using the same selection-or-dialing language | List-based dialing can trigger consent duties federal law would not |
Connecticut | Conn. Gen. Stat. §§ 42-284 to 42-289 | Raising the consent standard across sales calls | Consent artifacts needed for calls that are federally exempt |
Texas | SB 140, in effect since September 1, 2025 | Registration and a private right of action | Register before the first solicitation, not after |
Virginia | Telephone Privacy Protection Act, as amended January 1, 2026 | A long opt-out retention mandate | Suppression records outlive most CRM retention defaults |
Multi-state is where this stops being a reading exercise. A campaign running into four states runs four rule sets at once, and the settings that satisfy the loosest will not satisfy the others. The failure is a single global setting: a 9:00 p.m. cutoff configured once, which is legal federally and an hour late for every Florida number on the list. For the wider picture, our state-by-state mini-TCPA reference guide covers the statutes that change how a campaign gets built, including calling hours, registration duties and which state’s law applies when caller and consumer are in different places.
Running one campaign into four states?
A compliance audit walks your dialer settings, consent records and suppression process against every state your list touches.
What records prove your autodialer campaign was compliant?
The ones you can produce without rebuilding them. Both the FCC and FTC rules make record-keeping a condition of the safe harbors, which means a campaign run correctly but documented loosely loses the protection it earned. The FTC’s list sits at 16 C.F.R. § 310.5, which names the scripts, call records, consent artifacts and registry-access documentation you keep, and sets five years as the retention period.
Five artifacts carry most of the weight. The consent record for each number, with the disclosure language as the person saw it. The scrub log, showing which registry version was used and when. Abandonment statistics per 30-day period per campaign. Revocation events with the timestamp of receipt and the timestamp of suppression. And the script version each agent was working from, with the QA record showing it was followed.
That last one is the one teams skip. It is also the one that turns a written policy into evidence. A consent disclaimer protects you only if it was actually read, which is why scoring deviation as an automatic fail changes the value of the whole file.
None of this is exotic. It is the difference between a campaign you can scale into a new state next quarter and one you have to re-examine from the beginning every time the map changes.
Frequently asked questions
Is it legal to use an autodialer for B2B sales calls?
Yes, with conditions. Dialing software is not prohibited; the rules govern how it is used. The Telemarketing Sales Rule’s business-to-business exemption is an exemption from the FTC’s rule only, and it does not change the TCPA’s consent requirements for autodialed or prerecorded marketing calls to wireless numbers. Business contacts answer cell phones, and those numbers are treated the same as any other.
Does a power dialer or preview dialer count as an autodialer under the TCPA?
No, not under the federal definition. The TCPA’s autodialer definition reaches equipment that can store or produce numbers using a random or sequential number generator, and dialing from a supplied list does not meet that test after Facebook v. Duguid. Several state statutes define automated dialing more broadly, so the answer changes with where the person you are calling lives.
What consent do I need before my predictive dialer calls a cell phone?
For marketing calls placed with an autodialer or an artificial or prerecorded voice, you need prior express written consent: a signed agreement naming the number, authorizing that specific seller to send telemarketing messages by those means, and disclosing clearly that signing is not a condition of purchase. Informational calls and live manual calls sit under different requirements.
Is ringless voicemail covered by the TCPA?
Yes. In a declaratory ruling issued on November 21, 2022, the FCC found that a ringless voicemail delivered to a wireless phone is a call made using an artificial or prerecorded voice, and therefore requires consent under the TCPA. The delivery method does not change the analysis.
What do I have to change about my dialer campaign if I call into Florida or Maryland?
How often do I have to scrub against the Do Not Call registry?
To rely on the safe harbor, the registry version you scrub against must have been obtained no more than 31 days before the call is placed. That is the outer limit, not a target. Campaigns dialing continuously scrub on a schedule well inside it and maintain their own suppression list in parallel, with do-not-call requests honored within ten business days and kept for five years.
Put numbers on your current setup
The Outreach & Compliance Risk Calculator takes your monthly call volume and error rate and returns the statutory ranges that apply, under both the TCPA and the Telemarketing Sales Rule. It runs in the browser and takes about a minute.
