Is It Legal to Text Old Leads? The TCPA Rules That Actually Apply

The consent rules that decide whether you can text the dormant leads in your CRM, straight from the FCC rulebook — plus the opt-out clock and the numbers on how people respond.

Every contractor sitting on a database of old leads eventually asks the same question, usually right before a slow month: can I just text these people? The short answer is that it depends on what those people did, when they did it, and what you are about to send them. The rules are specific, they are public, and most of the advice floating around gets them wrong.

This is general information, not legal advice. If you are about to text tens of thousands of people, have a lawyer look at your consent records first.

Is it legal to text a lead who filled out a form two years ago?

It depends on the message. A service text sits on very different footing than a promotion. An appointment confirmation or a follow-up on the estimate they asked for is one thing. Marketing texts sent to a mobile number using an autodialer are another: those require prior express written consent under the FCC's rules, and a form fill from two years ago is almost never that.

The rule most operators lean on instead is the established business relationship, and it is much narrower than people think. The FCC defines it as a relationship built on the subscriber's purchase or transaction within the eighteen months immediately preceding the call, or an inquiry or application within the three months preceding it. Three months. A quote request from 2024 is not an established business relationship in 2026, no matter how warm the lead felt at the time.

There is a second trap here. An established business relationship is a defense against the do-not-call rules. It is not a substitute for the written consent that autodialed marketing messages require. Two different rules, two different tests, and a database can clear one and fail the other.

Prior express written consent means a signed written agreement that names the telephone number, states that the person is authorizing marketing messages sent by autodialer or prerecorded voice, and tells them they are not required to sign it as a condition of buying anything. An electronic signature counts. A checkbox buried in a footer generally does not.

The other variable is your sending platform. The FCC defines an autodialer as equipment that stores or produces numbers using a random or sequential number generator and dials them. Most business texting platforms send to a list you uploaded, which is a live legal question rather than a settled one. Several states also impose stricter rules on top of the federal ones. Do not assume your vendor's compliance page settles it for your state.

What does the FCC actually require when someone replies STOP?

You have to honor it within a reasonable time, not to exceed ten business days from receipt. That rule took effect on April 11, 2025. It applies to any reasonable method the person uses, not only to the reply keyword you had in mind.

The rule names seven words that count automatically when sent as a reply to your text: stop, quit, end, revoke, opt out, cancel, and unsubscribe. If someone replies with different words, you still have to treat it as a revocation when a reasonable person would read it that way. "Take me off this list" counts. So does "quit texting me."

One more line in that rule catches people out: you may not designate an exclusive means of revoking consent. A footer that says "reply STOP to unsubscribe" is fine. A policy that ignores an opt-out because it arrived by email or voicemail is not. The FCC announced the framework in February 2024 and it has been in force since.

Read the right-hand column again. Written consent is the gate for autodialed marketing in every row. The middle column answers a separate question: whether you can make a telephone solicitation to a number sitting on the national do-not-call registry. That window expires far faster than most operators assume.

What time of day are you allowed to send?

Federal rules bar telephone solicitations to a residential subscriber before 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m., local time where the person is, which is a different clock from yours. For a contractor running one market that is a non-issue. For anyone texting across time zones it is the easiest violation in the book, and several states run tighter windows than the federal floor.

Preference points the same direction as the law. In SimpleTexting's 2026 survey of 1,000 U.S. consumers, 44% named the afternoon between noon and 5 p.m. as when they most want to hear from a business. Send at 7:45 a.m. and you are gambling on a rule you did not need to test.

Do people actually respond to texts from a business?

They do, and fast. In the same survey, 74% of consumers said they check their text notifications within five minutes, and 23% within one minute. Opt-in has been climbing for five straight years: 85.6% of consumers reported being opted in to business texts in 2026, up from 61.8% in 2021. The channel is not the constraint.

Frequency is. Asked why they leave a list, 55% of consumers named messaging too often, against 21% who cited spam-like content and 13% who said the messages were not relevant. Half said they would prefer to hear from a business once every other week. A reactivation campaign that hits a dormant list four times in a week will generate opt-outs faster than appointments, and every one of those opt-outs is a number you can never text again.

• Pull the list and cut anyone who asked not to be contacted, ever, on any channel
• Segment by what the lead actually did — purchase, inquiry, or neither — and by when
• Check your consent records against what you are about to send, message type by message type
• Give every message a plain opt-out and route every opt-out reply to one place
• Staff the replies, because a reactivated lead goes cold as fast as a fresh one and the speed-to-lead research applies here too

What is changing in 2026 and 2027?

Two moving pieces are worth tracking. The first is the FCC's one-to-one consent rule, which would have required consent to name a single seller. The Eleventh Circuit vacated it, the mandate issued April 30, 2025, and the FCC conformed its rules on August 29, 2025, reinstating the earlier definition of written consent.

The second is narrower and still open. One piece of the revocation rule — the part requiring that an opt-out from one type of message be applied to all future messages from you on unrelated subjects — is under waiver while the FCC reconsiders it. In January 2026 the Commission extended that waiver to January 31, 2027. Everything else in the revocation rule, including the ten business days, is in force today.

The reason to care is arithmetic. Under 47 U.S.C. 227(b)(3), a plaintiff can recover $500 for each violating message, and a court may treble that to $1,500 if it finds the violation willful or knowing. Run those numbers against a list of 10,000 and you can see why a sloppy send arrives as a class action rather than a fine.

What does a compliant reactivation campaign look like?

It starts with the records. Before a single message goes out, you should be able to point to what each contact did and when, what they agreed to receive, and whether they ever told you to stop. Most CRMs in home services hold the first two and lose the third somewhere between the office phone and a technician's notes.

Then it gets narrow on purpose. The carriers apply their own layer on top of the FCC's. The CTIA's Messaging Principles and Best Practices call for a clear and conspicuous call to action, confirmed opt-in for recurring messages, one opt-in per campaign, and no renting or sharing of opt-in lists. Carriers filter traffic that ignores this whether or not anyone sues you.

The unsegmented blast is what gets contractors sued. Database reactivation run off a cleaned, segmented list with a human answering the replies does not, and that is the whole shape of how to run a 30-day lead reactivation campaign. If you want someone to run the audit on your database before anything goes out, that is where our lead reactivation service starts.