This page is orientation, not legal advice. It quotes each rule so you can read it yourself, and it is written for the person who has to decide when the dialer starts on Monday. If you call consumers at volume across state lines, take this to counsel.
The federal floor, in the words of both rules
Two federal agencies set the same window, and neither leaves the clock open to interpretation.
The FCC, at 47 CFR 64.1200(c)(1):
No person or entity shall initiate any telephone solicitation to any residential telephone subscriber before the hour of 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m. (local time at the called party's location)
The FTC's Telemarketing Sales Rule, at 16 CFR 310.4(c):
Without the prior consent of a person, it is an abusive telemarketing act or practice and a violation of this part for a telemarketer to engage in outbound telephone calls to a person's residence at any time other than between 8:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m. local time at the called person's location.
So the federal window is 8am to 9pm, 13 hours a day, 91 hours a week, measured on the clock where the phone rings. Your office hours have nothing to do with it.
That is the floor. States build on top of it, and 9 of them build higher.
The 9 states verified for this page
| State | Mon to Fri | Saturday | Sunday | Hours a week | Rule |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alabama | 8am to 8pm | 8am to 8pm | no calls | 72 | Ala. Admin. Code r. 770-X-5-.17 |
| Florida | 8am to 8pm | 8am to 8pm | 8am to 8pm | 84 | Fla. Stat. 501.616(6) |
| Maryland | 8am to 8pm | 8am to 8pm | 8am to 8pm | 84 | Md. Code, Com. Law 14-4502(c) |
| Michigan | 9am to 9pm | 9am to 9pm | 9am to 9pm | 84 | MCL 750.540e(1)(f) |
| Minnesota | 9am to 9pm | 9am to 9pm | 9am to 9pm | 84 | Minn. Stat. 325E.30 |
| Mississippi | 8am to 8pm | 8am to 8pm | no calls | 72 | Miss. PSC Rules ch. 28, rule 12(b) and 12(c) |
| Oklahoma | 8am to 8pm | 8am to 8pm | 8am to 8pm | 84 | 15 O.S. 775C.4 |
| Rhode Island | 9am to 6pm | 10am to 5pm | no calls | 52 | R.I. Gen. Laws 5-61-3.6(a), defined at 5-61-2 |
| Texas | 9am to 9pm | 9am to 9pm | noon to 9pm | 81 | Tex. Bus. & Com. Code 301.051(b)(2) |
| Federal floor | 8am to 9pm | 8am to 9pm | 8am to 9pm | 91 | 47 CFR 64.1200(c)(1) |
The right-hand column is the point. Every window above was read off the rule named beside it on 2026-09-09, and the operative words are reproduced further down so you can check the reading rather than trust it.
Two rows deserve a second look before you use the table.
Rhode Island costs you 39 hours a week. 52 against the federal 91. Its statute does not set hours directly. Section 5-61-3.6(a) bars unsolicited telephonic sales calls "except during hours of operation", and the definition of that phrase at 5-61-2 is where the numbers live: 9am to 6pm Monday to Friday except a state or federal holiday, 10am to 5pm Saturday. Sunday is absent from the definition, so Sunday has no permitted hours.
Texas moves its Sunday start rather than closing the day. noon to 9pm on Sunday against 9am to 9pm the rest of the week. The rule lives in chapter 301 of the Business and Commerce Code. Several guides cite chapter 302 for it, which covers registration and says nothing about hours.
Whose clock governs, which is less settled than it looks
Every summary of this topic repeats that calling hours run on the called party's local time. That is exactly right federally. Across the states verified here it holds for fewer of them than you would expect.
4 of the 9 name a clock. Florida and Oklahoma use identical words, "local time in the called person's time zone". Maryland says "the called party's time zone". And Mississippi says something else entirely:
Calls may only be made between the hours of 8:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. Central Standard Time. No telephone calls can be made on a Sunday or any legal holiday.
Central Standard Time, fixed, rather than the clock where the phone rings. Read literally that is a single named zone applied to every call into the state, and it names Standard Time in a state that observes daylight saving for most of the year. No page currently ranking for this query mentions it.
The remaining 5 rules, in Alabama, Michigan, Minnesota, Rhode Island and Texas, fix a window and name no time zone at all. In practice a caller applies the called party's local time, because that is the federal standard and the conservative reading. It is worth knowing that the state text does not say so.
Then there is the harder problem underneath all of it. "The called party's location" has to be determined from something, and the two available signals are the area code and the billing address. Number portability and mobile phones have been pulling those apart for twenty years. A 617 number can sit in Denver for a decade. The working rule the defence bar gives is to take the more restrictive of the two.
Where the pages currently ranking disagree with each other
Search this question and you get vendor guides. Two of the most visible ones contradict each other on the same states, and neither mentions the other.
| Question | One guide says | The other says | The rule says |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rhode Island, Saturday | 9am to 5pm | 10am to 5pm | 10am to 5pm |
| Michigan, weekdays | 8am to 9pm, "aligns with federal baseline" | 9am to 9pm | 9am to 9pm, with a caveat below |
| Florida, Sunday | "no Sunday calls" | 8am to 8pm | 8am to 8pm; the statute sets no Sunday rule |
On Rhode Island the definition at 5-61-2 says "Saturday ten o'clock (10:00 a.m.) to five o'clock (5:00 p.m.)". An hour is not a rounding error when the penalty is a misdemeanour.
On Florida, section 501.616(6) sets a window and a three-call cap and says nothing about Sunday. A guide that adds a Sunday ban costs its reader a seventh of the week for no reason in the text.
The citations that point somewhere else
The more useful check is on the citations themselves, because two of the ones attached to that table lead to statutes about public holidays.
Alabama is cited to Ala. Code 1-3-8. That section is headed "Official State Holidays Enumerated; Observation of State Holidays; Personal Leave Days; Compensatory Leave Days", and it sits in Title 1, General Provisions. It enumerates which days state offices close. The rule that actually restricts solicitation hours in Alabama is a Public Service Commission regulation, Ala. Admin. Code r. 770-X-5-.17, which says calls are placed neither "prior to 8 a.m. or after 8 p.m." and that "No solicitation calls are allowed on Sundays or holidays."
Rhode Island is cited to R.I. Gen. Laws 25-1-1. That section is headed "General holidays enumerated" and sits in Title 25, "Holidays and Days of Special Observance". It lists New Year's Day, Victory Day, Labor Day and the rest. The operative rule is R.I. Gen. Laws 5-61-3.6(a), defined at 5-61-2.
Both citations look authoritative in a table and neither supports the row it is attached to. That pattern is worth knowing about before you paste a compliance chart into an operations document, because the chart is the part a colleague will check and the citation is the part they will trust.
Michigan sits in the Penal Code, and the wording matters
Michigan's rule is the one most likely to be quoted wrongly, in either direction. The words are:
Making an unsolicited commercial telephone call that is received between the hours of 9 p.m. and 9 a.m.
Which reads like a plain 9am to 9pm telemarketing window. It sits at MCL 750.540e(1)(f), inside a section headed "Malicious use of service provided by telecommunications service provider", and subsection (1) opens like this:
A person who maliciously uses any service provided by a telecommunications service provider with intent to terrorize, frighten, intimidate, threaten, harass, molest, or annoy another person, or to disturb the peace and quiet of another person by doing any of the following is guilty of a misdemeanor
The out-of-hours call is subdivision (f) of that list. Its neighbours are threats of physical harm, obscene language, and repeatedly ringing someone and hanging up. So Michigan's window carries a criminal intent element that a state telemarketing act does not, and the penalty is up to six months or $1,000.
The operating advice is unchanged: stop at 9pm and start at 9am in Michigan. What changes is how you read a compliance chart that lists Michigan next to Florida as though the two are the same kind of rule. They come from different bodies of law and one of them can put a person in front of a criminal court.
The arithmetic nobody on this SERP does
Here is what the state rules cost a dialing operation, which is the question the vendor guides stop just short of.
Take the strictest weekday window across all 9 verified states: start no earlier than 9am, finish no later than 6pm, local time. That is 9 hours, against the federal 13.
Now dial the whole country on one clock, the way a single campaign in a single dialer does.
A zone k hours behind Eastern reaches its local opening hour k hours after Eastern does, and reaches its local closing hour k hours later too. So the window every zone shares, expressed in Eastern time, opens when Pacific opens and closes when Eastern closes.
- Federal rule only: 11am to 9pm Eastern. 10 hours. This is the well-known safe harbour, and it costs you 3 of the 13 federal hours.
- Federal rule plus the 9 states above: noon to 6pm Eastern. 6 hours, weekdays only, with 3 of those states permitting no Sunday calling and Saturday tighter again.
So a national list run on one clock has 6 compliant hours a day where a zone-partitioned one has 9. On a flat dial rate that is the seat count changing:
| Tool | 4 seats, dialing by zone | 6 seats, one national window | Difference a month |
|---|---|---|---|
| DialSheet | $58 | $58 | no change |
| PhoneBurner | $560 | $840 | $280 more |
| Kixie | est. $260 | est. $390 | est. $130 more |
| JustCall | $196 | $294 | $98 more |
| Myphoner | $108 | $162 | $54 more |
Both columns place the same number of dials a month. Telephony does not move either, because the dial count does not move; only the software bill does. What the table prices is the cost of refusing to partition the list, and on a per-seat tool it runs from $54 to $280 a month.
The practical conclusion is dull and worth stating anyway: partition the list. Four campaigns, one per continental zone, each firing on its own schedule, plus a suppression rule for Alabama, Mississippi and Rhode Island on Sundays and a stop time of 6pm for Rhode Island. Any dialer can do this if the list carries a state column. Most lists do not carry one, which is where the work actually is.
What the list needs before any of this works
Three fields decide whether the rules above are enforceable in your dialer, and none of them arrives with a purchased list by default.
State. Not the area code. The billing state, from the CRM record, with the area code as a fallback and the more restrictive of the two winning where they disagree.
Time zone. Derived from the state, except for the seven states split across two zones, where it has to come from the address.
Last contacted, with a timestamp. 3 of the 9 states here cap calls at three per 24 hours on the same subject, and count that across every number you call from. A per-number counter satisfies neither.
A dialer without those three fields cannot enforce a state rule no matter what its marketing page says about compliance. That is the question to ask in a demo, and it is more useful than asking whether the tool is "TCPA compliant", which no tool can be on its own.
Where the cheap answer is the wrong one
DialSheet prices seats in packs rather than per user, so the 6-seat column above costs it nothing extra, and at $58 a month against an estimated $390 for Kixie and $840 for PhoneBurner it is the cheapest way to run four zone-partitioned campaigns. It imports the state and time-zone columns from CSV and drives them through a REST API.
There are two clear cases where that is the wrong purchase, and both turn on where the state field lives.
If the state and last-contacted fields live in Salesforce or HubSpot, buy the tool that reads them. DialSheet has no connector to either, only a REST API and CSV import, so every campaign rebuild is an export. Kixie dials from inside the record, and at an estimated $390 a month against $58 the gap is about $332 a month for not maintaining that export by hand. Kixie stopped publishing figures during 2026, so its column is a March 2026 third-party estimate rather than a price read off its own page, and the exact gap is unknowable until it publishes again. On a list that changes daily, that is the cheaper answer, and a stale export is precisely how a suppressed number gets dialled again.
If one person is putting 200 aged records a day through a shortened window, buy the voicemail drop. PhoneBurner at $840 a month for 6 seats includes voicemail drop and one-click follow-up email; DialSheet has neither. When the compliant window is 6 hours instead of 9, the per-dial time saving is worth more than it is on a full day, and the $782 a month gap buys it.
Our ranking of power dialers prices the field at one, three and ten seats if you want the whole comparison rather than these three.
The rules as written
Everything above rests on these, each read on the date shown.
| Rule | The words that carry it | Read |
|---|---|---|
| Ala. Admin. Code r. 770-X-5-.17 | "none will be placed prior to 8 a.m. or after 8 p.m. ... No solicitation calls are allowed on Sundays or holidays." | 2026-09-09 |
| Fla. Stat. 501.616(6) | "A commercial telephone solicitation phone call before 8 a.m. or after 8 p.m. local time in the called person's time zone ... More than three commercial telephone solicitation phone calls from any number to a person over a 24-hour period on the same subject matter or issue" | 2026-09-09 |
| Md. Code, Com. Law 14-4502(c) | "To a called party during the hours between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. in the called party's time zone ... More than three times to the same called party during a 24-hour period on the same subject matter or issue, regardless of the telephone numbers used to make the call" | 2026-09-09 |
| MCL 750.540e(1)(f) | "Making an unsolicited commercial telephone call that is received between the hours of 9 p.m. and 9 a.m." | 2026-09-09 |
| Minn. Stat. 325E.30 | "A caller shall not use an automatic dialing-announcing device nor make any commercial telephone solicitation before 9:00 a.m. or after 9:00 p.m." | 2026-09-09 |
| Miss. PSC Rules ch. 28, rule 12(b) and 12(c) | "Calls may only be made between the hours of 8:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. Central Standard Time. No telephone calls can be made on a Sunday or any legal holiday." | 2026-09-09 |
| 15 O.S. 775C.4 | "before 8 a.m. or after 8 p.m. local time in the called person's time zone ... More than three commercial telephone solicitation phone calls from any number to a person over a twenty-four-hour period on the same subject matter or issue" | 2026-09-09 |
| R.I. Gen. Laws 5-61-3.6(a), defined at 5-61-2 | "Monday through Friday, except a state or federal holiday, nine o'clock (9:00 a.m.) to six o'clock (6:00 p.m.); Saturday ten o'clock (10:00 a.m.) to five o'clock (5:00 p.m.)" | 2026-09-09 |
| Tex. Bus. & Com. Code 301.051(b)(2) | "after 12 noon and before 9 p.m. on a Sunday or after 9 a.m. and before 9 p.m. on a weekday or a Saturday" | 2026-09-09 |
What this page does not cover, and why
9 states, because 9 rules were read against their primary source. Other states restrict calling hours. Connecticut, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Utah, Louisiana, Oregon, Washington and Wyoming all appear on other tables with windows tighter than the federal floor, and none of them appears above, for the single reason that their statutes have not been read here yet. They will be added one at a time as they are.
Copying those rows across would have made this page look complete today. Given that the citations on the source tables lead to holiday statutes at least twice, a copied row is a coin flip, and a wrong calling window is a legal error the reader acts on rather than an inaccuracy they can shrug at. The federal floor plus 9 checked states is the part of this that is safe to act on.
Sources
- 47 CFR 64.1200(c)(1), FCC restrictions on telephone solicitation, read 2026-09-09
- 16 CFR 310.4(c), FTC Telemarketing Sales Rule, calling time restrictions, read 2026-09-09
- Ala. Admin. Code r. 770-X-5-.17, Alabama, read 2026-09-09
- Fla. Stat. 501.616(6), Florida, read 2026-09-09
- Md. Code, Com. Law 14-4502(c), Maryland, read 2026-09-09
- MCL 750.540e(1)(f), Michigan, read 2026-09-09
- Minn. Stat. 325E.30, Minnesota, read 2026-09-09
- Miss. PSC Rules ch. 28, rule 12(b) and 12(c), Mississippi, read 2026-09-09
- 15 O.S. 775C.4, Oklahoma, read 2026-09-09
- R.I. Gen. Laws 5-61-3.6(a), defined at 5-61-2, Rhode Island, read 2026-09-09
- Tex. Bus. & Com. Code 301.051(b)(2), Texas, read 2026-09-09
- Ala. Code 1-3-8 and R.I. Gen. Laws 25-1-1, the two state-holiday statutes cited on a widely copied calling-hours table, read 2026-09-09
Frequently asked questions
- What are the TCPA calling hours?
- 8am to 9pm, local time at the called party's location. The FCC rule at 47 CFR 64.1200(c)(1) bars a telephone solicitation to a residential subscriber "before the hour of 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m.", and the FTC's Telemarketing Sales Rule at 16 CFR 310.4(c) sets the same window in almost the same words. Both fix the clock at the person being called, so the caller's own office hours are irrelevant to the question.
- Which state has the strictest telemarketing calling hours?
- Rhode Island, of the 9 verified on this page. Its Telephone Sales Solicitation Act permits unsolicited calls only during defined hours of operation: 9am to 6pm Monday to Friday except state and federal holidays, and 10am to 5pm on Saturday. Sunday appears nowhere in the definition, so no hours are permitted. That is 52 hours a week against the federal 91, and violation is a misdemeanour under R.I. Gen. Laws 5-61-3.6(a), defined at 5-61-2.
- Which states ban telemarketing calls on Sunday?
- Alabama, Mississippi and Rhode Island, among the 9 verified here. Alabama and Mississippi both bar Sunday and legal holiday calls outright in Public Service Commission rules. Rhode Island reaches the same result differently: its statute permits calls only during hours of operation, and the definition of that term names Monday to Saturday only. Texas allows Sunday calling but starts it at noon instead of 9am.
- Do calling hours follow the caller's time zone or the called party's?
- The federal rules say the called party's, in terms. State rules are less uniform than the summaries suggest. Of the 9 verified here, only 4 name a clock: Florida and Oklahoma say "local time in the called person's time zone", Maryland says "the called party's time zone", and Mississippi says "Central Standard Time", which is a fixed zone rather than the called party's own. The other 5 fix a window and name no time zone at all.
- How many calls a day can you make to the same person?
- Three, in 3 of the 9 states verified here. Florida, Maryland and Oklahoma each cap solicitation calls at three to the same person over any 24 hours on the same subject matter. Maryland and Oklahoma both add that the cap holds regardless of which number the calls come from, which defeats the usual workaround of rotating the caller ID and dialling the same person again.
- Can you dial a national list on one calling window?
- Only a narrow one. Observing the federal 8am to 9pm rule in all four continental time zones at once leaves 10 hours, 11am to 9pm Eastern. Adding the 9 state rules verified here cuts it to 6 hours, noon to 6pm Eastern, weekdays only. A team that dials on one clock instead of partitioning by zone needs 6 seats to place what 4 seats place, on a flat dial rate.
- Is this list of state calling hours complete?
- No, and it says so on purpose. 9 states are covered here because 9 statutes and rules were read against their primary source on 2026-09-09. Other states restrict calling hours and are absent from this page for the single reason that nobody here has read their statute yet. A wrong calling window is a legal error a reader acts on, so an unverified state is left out rather than copied from another table.
How to cite this page
Abhi Chawla. "TCPA calling hours by state, with every rule quoted from its source." MRR Nerds, 2026-09-09. https://www.mrrnerds.com/guides/tcpa-calling-hours-by-state. Accessed 2026-09-09.
The underlying vendor data is published at /data under CC BY 4.0. Cite the dataset for numbers, this page for the analysis.