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Robocalls and the TCPA

The federal law that restricts automated and prerecorded calls and texts to your phone, gives you a Do Not Call right, and lets you sue for a fixed amount per illegal call.

Informational only - this is not legal advice. These definitions explain general legal vocabulary in plain English. They are not advice about your situation, reading them creates no attorney-client relationship, and the law differs from state to state and changes over time. For advice you can rely on, speak to a lawyer licensed in your state.

What it means

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act restricts three things: calls or texts to a mobile phone made with an automatic telephone dialing system or an artificial or prerecorded voice without the called party's prior express consent; prerecorded telemarketing calls to residential lines; and telemarketing calls to numbers on the national Do Not Call Registry. It is one of the few consumer statutes that a consumer can enforce directly, for a fixed statutory amount per violating call or text - increased for wilful violations - with no need to prove any loss.

Consent is the centre of most disputes. Giving a business your number does not by itself consent to automated marketing; for telemarketing robocalls the consent must be in writing, and consent can be revoked by any reasonable means. Calls from debt collectors, banks and health-care providers are covered too, though under different consent rules from marketers, and some categories - emergency calls, certain government calls - are exempt.

What counts as an "automatic telephone dialing system" narrowed considerably after the Supreme Court read the definition to require equipment that generates numbers randomly or sequentially, which most modern dialers do not; prerecorded-voice and Do Not Call claims were unaffected and now carry most of the enforcement weight. The Registry itself is free, a registration does not expire, and a marketer must honour it and keep its own internal do-not-call list on request.

Where this comes from

The statute is 47 U.S.C. § 227, with the private right of action at § 227(b)(3) and (c)(5); the Federal Communications Commission's implementing rules, including the consent and Do Not Call provisions, are at 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200. The Do Not Call Registry is also enforced under the Federal Trade Commission's Telemarketing Sales Rule, 16 C.F.R. § 310.4(b). Facebook, Inc. v. Duguid, 592 U.S. 395 (2021), is the decision that narrowed the autodialer definition.

When people hire a lawyer for this

Keep the evidence first - the numbers, dates, screenshots of texts, and any record of telling the caller to stop - because a claim is built call by call. A lawyer can tell you which of the three prohibitions the calls fall under and whether the caller can be identified and reached, which is the practical limit on many of these cases; a caller spoofing a number from abroad is not a defendant anyone can serve.

Find a lawyer for this in your state

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Part of the LawyerLand plain-English legal glossary. Definitions are written from primary sources - statutes and court rules - and each entry states the authority it rests on, or says plainly when the doctrine is state law with no national rule.

If you cannot afford a lawyer, civil legal aid programmes provide free help with many of these problems: civil legal aid programmes by state.

Related free reference tools: statute of limitations for a personal-injury claim, by state, quoted from each state's official text - part of LawyerLand's legal reference tools.