Internal Do Not Call Policy Claims: What the TCPA Requires in 2025

A business that makes telemarketing calls must have “a written policy, available upon demand, for maintaining a do-not-call list,” under 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200(d)(1). It must also train its callers and honor stop requests by a deadline that shrinks on April 11, 2025. Plaintiffs have pleaded each duty as a separate count. Courts disagree about which of those counts a private plaintiff can bring and who has standing to bring them, which gives a defendant real room to narrow the case.

What do the internal Do Not Call rules require?

A written policy, trained callers, a working list, and timely removal.

The rule covers every “call for telemarketing purposes to a residential telephone subscriber,” along with prerecorded calls made under several of the FCC’s exemptions, per § 64.1200(d). A company may not make those calls at all unless it has “instituted procedures for maintaining a list of persons who request not to receive such calls.” The minimum standards are:

A written policy. Callers must keep the written policy described above and produce it when asked.

Training. Under (d)(2), personnel “engaged in any aspect of telemarketing must be informed and trained in the existence and use of the do-not-call list.”

Recording and honoring requests. Under (d)(3), a request must go on the list “at the time the request is made,” and the company must honor it within a reasonable time. Until April 11, 2025, the outside limit reads: “This period may not exceed 30 days from the date of such request.” The same paragraph puts responsibility on the seller when a vendor keeps the list: “the person or entity on whose behalf the call is made will be liable for any failures to honor the do-not-call request.”

Identification. Under (d)(4), the caller must give the called party the caller’s name, the name of the company the call is for, and a telephone number or address where that company can be reached.

Retention. Under (d)(6), “A do-not-call request must be honored for 5 years from the time the request is made.”

On their face, these rules reach further than the National Do Not Call Registry rule. The Registry rule applies to a “telephone solicitation,” which the FCC defines to exclude calls to people who gave permission or have an established business relationship with the caller, and calls by or for a tax-exempt nonprofit, in § 64.1200(f)(15). The internal list rule applies to “telemarketing,” which has none of those exclusions. Whether a private plaintiff can sue over a call to a consenting customer is a different question. Section 227(c) directs the FCC to protect subscribers from “telephone solicitations to which they object,” and the statute’s own definition of telephone solicitation excludes calls made with “prior express invitation or permission” and calls to people with an “established business relationship,” in § 227(a)(4). A defendant sued by its own customer should consider that argument. And a customer’s stop request “terminates an established business relationship for purposes of telemarketing and telephone solicitation even if the subscriber continues to do business with the seller,” under § 64.1200(f)(5)(i).

The FTC’s Telemarketing Sales Rule has its own version of these duties, and I compared the two regimes in a February post on Telemarketing Sales Rule recordkeeping.

What changes on April 11, 2025?

The outside limit for honoring a stop request drops from 30 days to ten business days. The FCC adopted the change in its 2024 revocation order, and the amended rule will read: “This period may not exceed ten (10) business days from the receipt of such request,” as published in the Federal Register on March 5, 2024. The FCC announced that the amendment to (d)(3) takes effect April 11, 2025, in a notice published October 11, 2024.

Ten business days is the ceiling. The rule also requires honoring a request “within a reasonable time,” under § 64.1200(d)(3). I’d build the process to suppress within a day or two and treat ten business days as the backstop.

Can a private plaintiff sue over a missing policy or training?

In many courts, yes, but the courts are split, and the split gives defendants an argument worth making.

The private claim comes from 47 U.S.C. § 227(c)(5). It belongs to a person who received “more than one telephone call within any 12-month period by or on behalf of the same entity in violation of the regulations prescribed under this subsection.” The words “this subsection” are the whole fight. Section 227(c) authorizes rules to protect residential subscribers from telephone solicitations they object to, and it carries a private claim. Section 227(d), titled “Technical and procedural standards,” authorizes rules for fax machines and for systems that send autodialed or prerecorded calls, and it carries none. As a federal court in North Carolina put it in Fischman v. MediaStratX, LLC, “The FCC did not state under which subsection of 47 U.S.C. § 227 it promulgated 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200(d).”

Many courts treat (d) as a § 227(c) rule. In Charvat v. NMP, LLC, the Sixth Circuit held that damages for the plaintiff’s (d) counts, including his identification and stop-request claims, run through § 227(c)(5) and let the plaintiff amend to plead them that way. The Eleventh Circuit said in Cordoba that the statute “creates a private right of action for anyone who receives more than one call within a year from the same entity in violation of these regulations.” Fischman sided with them after reviewing both lines of cases and held “that the FCC promulgated the relevant provisions of section 64.1200(d) under 47 U.S.C. § 227(c).”

Neither appellate opinion analyzed the § 227(d) argument in depth, and other district courts have gone the other way. Several of those decisions dealt only with the identification rule in (d)(4), which they read as a technical and procedural standard under § 227(d). Others reached all of (d). In Braver v. NorthStar Alarm Services, LLC, a federal court in Oklahoma said that Charvat reached its conclusion “without analysis” and granted the defendants summary judgment on the (d) count, holding: “There is no private right of action for alleged violations of §64.1200(d), and defendants are therefore entitled to summary judgment in their favor on count three.”

At least one of those courts has changed course. In December 2021, the court in Worsham v. Discount Power, Inc. reconsidered its own dismissal of a (d)(4) claim, following a Maryland appellate decision and concluding that the regulation “is best construed as a privacy protection that was originally promulgated pursuant to § 227(c).”

I won’t pretend the no-private-claim argument is strong. It has lost in many courts. It’s still worth preserving against a (d)(4) count in a court where no binding appellate decision has resolved it.

Charvat helps defendants in another way: it caps the arithmetic. Applying its earlier decision in Charvat v. GVN Michigan, the court held that a plaintiff who alleged several (d) violations, including identification and stop-request violations, in the same calls was “limited to collecting statutory damages on a per-call basis for his multiple claims.” A complaint that counts each (d) failure as a separate violation of the same call overstates the exposure under that reasoning. The same opinion did allow a separate recovery under § 227(b) when the call also used a prerecorded voice.

Pleading arguments do better. In Showers v. Pelican Investment Holdings Group, LLC, the Southern District of Illinois recognized a private claim under (d) but dismissed it without prejudice and with leave to amend, finding that allegations that the defendants had no written policy were “nothing more than conclusory, formulaic recitations of the elements of the cause of action.” In Dobronski v. Horvath & Tremblay, LLC, a federal court in Michigan dismissed written-policy and training counts with prejudice as conclusory. It added that the training rule does “not appear to apply to a person, like Flamand, who is alleged to have placed an improper telephone call,” a point worth raising when a plaintiff names an individual caller.

Does the plaintiff have to have asked you to stop?

For the list and policy claims, the Eleventh Circuit says yes, at least for standing.

In Cordoba v. DIRECTV, LLC, the court vacated certification of a class built on a vendor’s failure to keep an internal list. It held that “recipients of such calls who never asked the telemarketer to stop calling them do not have standing to sue over violations of the internal do-not-call list regulations because their injuries are not fairly traceable to the telemarketer’s failure to maintain an internal do-not-call list.” The named plaintiff, who had asked repeatedly, kept his claim.

Cordoba binds only the Eleventh Circuit, but its logic has traveled. A person who never said stop wouldn’t have been on a perfect list, so the missing list didn’t cause the next call. In Watson v. Manhattan Luxury Automobiles, Inc., a federal court in New York applied that reasoning to a dealership’s texts, finding that “even if Defendant had complied perfectly with the IDNC provision of the TCPA, Plaintiffs still would have received those messages.”

Removed cases carry a catch, and the answer depends on the court. In Thompson v. Vintage Stock, Inc., a federal court in Missouri held that a couple who never alleged asking a retailer to stop lacked standing for their (d) claim: “As pleaded, the Thompsons’ injury is simply not traceable to any of Vintage Stock’s allegedly unlawful conduct.” Because the retailer had removed the case from state court, the court later sent that claim back to state court instead of dismissing it, explaining that Eighth Circuit precedent required a remand. The Watson court went the other way, dismissing the internal-list claims after concluding that it “lacks statutory authority to remand.” Before removing a case built on (d) counts, check how courts in that circuit have handled it, because a standing win can mean litigating the same count in state court.

I’d raise traceability against every written-policy or training count brought by someone who never made a request, and I’d raise it again at class certification. The Cordoba court called the possibility that many class members lack standing “extremely important to the class certification decision.”

What does a defensible written policy contain?

One that matches what the company actually does, names the people responsible, and can be handed over the day someone asks for it.

The policy should cover every channel the company uses to market by phone, including live calls, prerecorded messages, and texts, and every brand and vendor that calls on its behalf. The FCC’s rules apply (c) and (d) to “telemarketing calls or text messages to wireless telephone numbers” to the extent its 2003 order describes, per § 64.1200(e), so a policy that only talks about phone calls leaves the text program unaddressed.

Then describe intake. A good policy treats a stop request as valid no matter how it arrives: on a call, by text reply, by email, through a web form, or in a letter. It says who logs the request, what gets recorded (the number, the name if given, the date, and the channel), and how fast the number is suppressed in every dialer and texting platform. Write the deadline you can actually meet. From April 11, 2025, the legal maximum is ten business days, and I’d set the internal standard at one or two.

The policy should bind vendors to the same intake rules and say whether a request to one brand covers the others. Unless the consumer asks otherwise, (d)(5) turns that question on what the consumer would reasonably expect.

Name the training (at onboarding and at least yearly), keep sign-in records, and honor each request for the five years the rule requires. Version and date the policy, because the version in force on the date of each call is the one that matters in a lawsuit.

A policy like this does more than answer a (d)(1) count. Written procedures and training, along with a list of numbers the company may not call, are also elements of the FCC’s safe harbor for calls to Registry numbers made in error, under § 64.1200(c)(2)(i). They’re also the core evidence for the statute’s own affirmative defense, available when a defendant “has established and implemented, with due care, reasonable practices and procedures to effectively prevent telephone solicitations in violation of the regulations prescribed under this subsection,” under § 227(c)(5). I’d prefer to defend a two-page policy the call center uses every day than a twenty-page policy no one has read.

Exposure and defenses for internal list claims

If an internal list claim arrives

1. Put a litigation hold on the call and text logs for the claimant’s number, the dialer and platform data, and the consent or relationship records behind each contact.
2. Pull the internal do-not-call list entries for the number, with the date and channel of every stop request and the date the number was suppressed.
3. Pull the National Do Not Call Registry scrub records and the Registry version dates used for the campaigns that reached the number.
4. Gather the written policy versions in force on each call date, training records, call scripts, vendor contracts, and any recordings.
5. Talk to a lawyer before answering the demand, sending the claimant a copy of the policy, or offering anything to settle.

The firm’s California TCPA defense lawyers page explains how it approaches claims involving internal do-not-call lists and stop requests.

Questions businesses ask about internal Do Not Call rules

Do the internal Do Not Call rules apply to our existing customers?

The rule’s text covers them. The internal list rule applies to telemarketing calls, and the FCC’s definition of telemarketing has no exception for customers or people who gave permission. Whether a consenting customer can sue over those calls under § 227(c)(5) is contestable, for the statutory reasons discussed above. A customer who asks you to stop marketing calls must go on the list, and that request ends the established business relationship for marketing purposes even if the customer keeps buying from you. Live service calls that don’t encourage a purchase fall outside it, but prerecorded calls to residential lines made under the exemptions in § 64.1200(a)(3)(ii) through (v) are covered.

What happens if a consumer asks for a copy of our written policy?

Send it. The rule says the policy must be “available upon demand,” in § 64.1200(d)(1), and a prompt answer with a real, dated policy takes away the easiest factual basis for a written-policy count. Have counsel review the cover letter before it goes out.

Can our vendor’s internal list protect us?

Only if it works. The FCC’s rule makes the seller liable when a vendor that keeps the list fails to honor a request. The vendor also needs the consumer’s permission before passing a stop request to anyone other than the seller or its affiliates. Contracts should require vendors to forward stop requests quickly and keep records for five years.

Defending an internal Do Not Call claim

If your company is accused of calling or texting someone after a stop request, or of operating without a written Do Not Call policy, the dated list entries and policy versions you keep will decide much of the case. Rosenberger + Kawabata represents businesses defending TCPA lawsuits and class actions through its business litigation practice, including claims involving internal do-not-call lists and stop requests. Contact Rosenberger + Kawabata online for a free and confidential consultation, or call (310) 894-6921.

Sources

The statute is the Telephone Consumer Protection Act at 47 U.S.C. § 227. The FCC’s rules are at 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200, as published in the eCFR through April 1, 2025. The ten-business-day amendment to § 64.1200(d)(3) was published at 89 Fed. Reg. 15756 (Mar. 5, 2024), and its April 11, 2025 effective date was announced at 89 Fed. Reg. 82518 (Oct. 11, 2024).

The court decisions are Charvat v. NMP, LLC, 656 F.3d 440 (6th Cir. 2011); Cordoba v. DIRECTV, LLC, 942 F.3d 1259 (11th Cir. 2019); Fischman v. MediaStratX, LLC, No. 2:20-CV-83-D (E.D.N.C. Aug. 10, 2021); Braver v. NorthStar Alarm Services, LLC, No. CIV-17-0383-F (W.D. Okla. July 16, 2019); Worsham v. Discount Power, Inc., No. RDB-20-0008 (D. Md. Dec. 1, 2021); Showers v. Pelican Investment Holdings Group, LLC, No. 3:23-CV-2864-NJR (S.D. Ill. Sept. 30, 2024); Watson v. Manhattan Luxury Automobiles, Inc., No. 20 Civ. 4572 (LGS) (S.D.N.Y. Sept. 29, 2022); Thompson v. Vintage Stock, Inc., No. 4:23-cv-00042-SRC (E.D. Mo. Feb. 8, 2024), modified by memorandum and order (E.D. Mo. Apr. 16, 2024); and Dobronski v. Horvath & Tremblay, LLC, No. 2:23-cv-10509 (E.D. Mich. Nov. 16, 2023).

This post is general information about the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and related laws as of April 1, 2025. It is not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Courts and the FCC change the rules in this area often, and the outcome of any claim depends on its facts. Past results do not guarantee future outcomes.