State Calling Hours: Texas Sundays, and 8 p.m. Cutoffs Elsewhere

A campaign scheduled for the Fourth of July weekend can break a state rule that the federal rule doesn’t contain. The federal window runs until 9 p.m. local time. Texas has different hours on Sundays, and Washington and Maryland end the day at 8 p.m. A company that sets its sending hours to the federal rule alone will eventually send a solicitation in an hour that a state forbids, and a state claim doesn’t care that the federal rule would have allowed it.

What does the federal rule allow?

The FCC’s rule bars telephone solicitations to a residential subscriber “before the hour of 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m. (local time at the called party’s location),” under 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200(c)(1). The paragraph draws no line between weekdays and weekends or between ordinary days and holidays, so a company that follows it alone has a single rule for every day.

State laws add their own windows. They are worth checking one by one, because the differences are small enough to miss and large enough to matter.

What does Texas require on Sundays?

Texas has a separate day-of-week rule. Under Business and Commerce Code § 301.051, a telephone solicitor may not make a consumer call unless it “makes the call 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.” The same subsection requires the solicitor to identify itself by name, the business it calls for, and the purpose of the call immediately after making contact.

Subsection (a) of that section lists calls to which it does not apply, including a consumer call placed “in response to the express request of the consumer” and one made “to a consumer with whom the telephone solicitor has a prior or existing business relationship.” So an existing-customer call may fall outside this section entirely. A cold or lapsed-customer campaign does not.

Before applying this section to texts, read the chapter’s definitions. Section 301.001(4) defines a consumer telephone call as “an unsolicited call made to a residential telephone number by a telephone solicitor” to sell a consumer good or service, extend credit for one, or gather information for that purpose. The chapter doesn’t mention text messages, so whether a text counts is a question of reading the statute. A cautious business would follow the Sunday hours for texts too.

Which states stop at 8 p.m.?

Washington is one. The statute provides that “A telephone solicitor shall not place calls to any person which will be received before 8:00 a.m. or after 8:00 p.m. at the call recipient’s local time,” in RCW 80.36.390(8). It defines a telephone call as “any communication made through a telephone that uses a live person, artificial voice, or recorded message,” and I haven’t read that definition as reaching text messages, so it is a calls rule on its face. Washington has other statutes aimed at texts, covered in the earlier post on Washington’s CEMA text claims.

Maryland is another. Commercial Law § 14-4502(c) bars a telephone solicitation “To a called party during the hours between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. in the called party’s time zone,” and Maryland’s consent definition refers to text messages, as I explained in the earlier post on Maryland’s statute.

Virginia follows the federal window. Va. Code § 59.1-511 says “No telephone solicitor shall initiate, or cause to be initiated, a telephone solicitation at any time other than between 8:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m. local time at the contacted person’s location, unless the telephone solicitor has obtained the prior consent of the contacted person.” That clause about prior consent is a difference: Virginia lets prior consent displace the time limit.

I haven’t found a holiday-specific calling limit in the sections I read for this post. That is not the same as saying none exists, so I’d check each state where you send before treating a holiday as an ordinary day.

How should a sender build the schedule?

The simplest approach is to code the strictest hours for the states you send to and apply them by recipient location, not by the sender’s office clock. A scheduler that uses one national window will inevitably send some messages in a restricted hour. A scheduler that stores the recipient’s state and time zone, and holds the message until the window opens, won’t.

I’d add a few guardrails. Block the sends on Sunday mornings for Texas numbers unless an exemption has been documented. Cap the evening hours for Washington and Maryland numbers at 8 p.m. in the recipient’s local time. And use the recipient’s area code only as a fallback, since a phone number’s area code isn’t a reliable indicator of where the person is today. Holiday weekends are when queues back up, so confirm that messages delayed by carrier congestion are not delivered after a state cutoff. If your platform queues messages, the time that matters is delivery, not submission.

What does a defensible hours program look like?

It has three parts, and none is complicated. The first is a single table of state rules, owned by someone in compliance, with a date on each row showing when it was last checked against the official text. The second is a scheduling system that reads that table and holds any message that would be delivered outside a permitted window. The third is a log that records, for every message, the recipient’s state and time zone, the window that applied, and the delivery time.

That log is also the defense. When a plaintiff alleges a message arrived at 8:30 p.m. in Washington, the company needs to show the delivery stamp, the recipient’s local time, and the rule the system applied. A company that can produce those three items from its own records usually resolves a time-of-day claim quickly. A company that has to reconstruct them from vendor exports months later usually doesn’t.

Holiday weekends deserve one extra check. Vendors queue messages during heavy sending, and carriers can delay delivery. If your campaign was scheduled for 7:45 p.m. and delivered at 8:20 p.m., the later time is the one a court will care about, so ask your vendor how it reports delivery and whether it will hold a message that would arrive late.

What to gather when a time-of-day claim arrives

1. Export the delivery time stamp, not only the send time, for each message, with the recipient’s time zone.
2. Identify the recipient’s state of residence and area code and the basis for each.
3. Pull the campaign schedule and the platform’s setting for sending hours on that date.
4. Collect any exemption facts, such as an existing relationship or the person’s request, that apply under the relevant state law.
5. Wait to respond to a demand letter or contact the recipient until a lawyer has reviewed the file.

The firm’s TCPA defense lawyers page describes how these claims move through court. For related reading, see the earlier post on state mini-TCPA laws.

Questions senders ask about state calling hours

Does the federal 9 p.m. rule protect us in a state with an 8 p.m. limit?

No. A state statute applies to calls and messages to its residents on top of the federal rule. Comply with the stricter one.

Do these rules apply to texts?

It depends on the statute. Virginia’s reaches texts expressly, and Maryland’s consent definition mentions them. Washington’s calling-hours provision, as I read it, is framed around telephone calls, and Texas’s chapter needs a check against its definitions. When in doubt, apply the hours to texts too.

Can a customer’s consent let us send after the cutoff?

Under Virginia’s statute, prior consent displaces the limit. I didn’t see that language in the Washington or Maryland provisions I quoted, so I’d not assume it.

What if our platform only lets us set one sending window for all recipients?

Then set it to the strictest window among the states you send to, or segment the list so that restricted states are sent in a separate batch. A single permissive window will eventually produce a violation. The cost of a shorter window is small next to the cost of defending a claim for each recipient in a restricted state.

Which time zone controls?

The statutes quoted here refer to the called party’s local time or location. Use the recipient’s, not yours.

Defending claims over sending hours

If your company has been sued or received a demand letter over messages sent at the wrong hour, the delivery time stamps and the recipient’s location will decide the case. Rosenberger + Kawabata represents businesses defending TCPA lawsuits and class actions through its business litigation practice, including claims involving calling hours and state statutes. Contact Rosenberger + Kawabata online for a free and confidential consultation, or call (310) 894-6921.

Sources

The federal rule is 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200, as published in the eCFR on July 1, 2026. The state statutes are Tex. Bus. & Com. Code § 301.051, RCW 80.36.390, Md. Code, Com. Law § 14-4502, and Va. Code § 59.1-511.

This post is general information about the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and related laws as of July 1, 2026. 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.