What Is the TCPA?
The TCPA is the federal law on marketing calls and texts. Here's what it requires, why it matters for home-service contractors, and how to stay on the right side of it.
What the TCPA covers
The Telephone Consumer Protection Act is the main federal law on telemarketing in the United States. It sets the rules for calls and texts sent to consumers, and it’s the law behind most of the “robocall” headlines. For a contractor, the part that matters is simple: if you want to call or text people to market your services, the TCPA decides when you’re allowed to — and what it costs if you get it wrong.
It also created the national Do Not Call registry and the rules on quiet hours (no telemarketing calls before 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m. in the recipient’s local time).
How it works
The TCPA draws a line based on how you contact someone and whether they agreed to it.
- Autodialed or prerecorded marketing calls and texts — the kind sent by software to a list — require prior express written consent. That’s a clear, signed agreement (a checkbox or digital signature counts) that names your business and isn’t buried or required to make a purchase.
- Manually dialed, person-to-person calls about an existing job sit on safer ground, especially with an established business relationship.
- Either way, once someone says stop, you stop. Honoring opt-outs is not optional.
The penalties are what give the law teeth: $500 per call or text, up to $1,500 if the violation is willful, with no cap on the total.
Why it matters for contractors
A lot of contractors inherit TCPA risk without realizing it — usually by buying a list or a batch of “leads” and running them through a texting tool. If those people never gave you consent, every message is exposure. One afternoon’s blast to a few hundred numbers can theoretically run into six figures of liability.
The flip side is reassuring: leads who actually opted in to hear from you are safe to contact on the channel they agreed to. The goal isn’t to fear follow-up — it’s to make sure the people you’re following up with said yes first.
Common mistakes
- Buying lists and texting them. No prior relationship, no consent, maximum risk.
- Treating an email opt-in as permission to text. Consent is channel-specific; email permission doesn’t authorize calls or texts.
- Ignoring “stop.” Continuing after an opt-out is the kind of willful violation that triggers the $1,500 tier.
- No records. If you can’t show when and how someone consented, you can’t defend the contact.
How it relates to consent
The TCPA is the reason “who said yes, and to what?” is the most important question in contractor marketing. Consent-first lead generation answers it by design: a lead is only handed to you after the person agreed to be contacted, tagged with the channel they approved, and backed by a record of that agreement. That’s the difference between a follow-up you can make confidently and one that could end in a lawsuit.