Political texting rules: TCPA and 10DLC explained

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act, 47 U.S.C. 227, makes it unlawful to call a cellular number using an automatic telephone dialing system or an artificial or prerecorded voice without the prior express consent of the called party, with narrow exceptions such as emergencies. The FCC and the courts have long treated text messages as calls under the statute. There is no exemption for political speech: a campaign text sent by an autodialer to a cell phone without consent is a violation, and the FCC's political campaign robocall and robotext page says so directly.

The penalty is what makes the statute matter. Section 227(b)(3) gives the recipient a private right of action for actual damages or $500 per violation, whichever is greater, and lets a court triple that for a willful or knowing violation. Per message. A campaign that sends 5,000 unconsented texts is looking at a $2.5 million claim before trebling, and class actions are routine.

What counts as an autodialer was narrowed in 2021. In Facebook v. Duguid, decided April 1, 2021, the Supreme Court held that a device qualifies as an automatic telephone dialing system only if it has the capacity to store or produce telephone numbers using a random or sequential number generator. Software that texts a list of numbers you uploaded is, under that reading, not an autodialer. But the FCC's rules still cover prerecorded and artificial voices regardless of dialing method, the carriers apply their own consent expectations to every sender, and plaintiffs' lawyers test the edges of Duguid constantly. Treat the ruling as a defense, not a permission slip.

The FCC's rules in 47 CFR 64.1200 distinguish two levels of consent. Prior express consent is enough for informational messages; the FCC's 2020 peer-to-peer ruling restates the long-standing view that a person who knowingly gives their number for a particular purpose has given permission to be contacted at that number for that purpose. Prior express written consent, a signed agreement that clearly authorizes the sender to deliver marketing messages using an autodialer or prerecorded voice, is required for telemarketing. Fundraising asks sit in a gray zone that lawyers argue about; the conservative practice is to send them only to people who gave written consent.

For a local campaign, the practical rule is that consent comes from your own supporters, not from a purchased list. A voter who wrote a cell number on your sign-up sheet, entered it on your website with a checkbox that said you would text them, or texted a keyword to your number has consented. A number appended to a voter file by a data vendor has not; the vendor sold you a number, not permission. The voter file guide explains why most state files have few phone numbers to begin with.

Write the consent language down and keep the record. A screenshot of the form, the timestamp, the number, and the text of the disclosure is what you will need if anyone ever asks. The carriers' CTIA Messaging Principles (May 2023) expect a clear call to action at opt-in that names the sender, describes the program, discloses that messages are recurring, and explains how to opt out.

• Consented: a supporter's own sign-up on paper, a web form with a texting checkbox, a keyword texted to your number, a reply to a human-sent message.
• Not consented: numbers appended by a data vendor, numbers scraped from anywhere, numbers a friend gave you, numbers from another campaign's list.
• Keep: the form text, the timestamp, the number, and the method, for every opt-in.

Peer-to-peer texting, in which a volunteer clicks send on each message one at a time from a web platform, grew up as a way to reach voters the campaign did not have consent to autodial. On June 25, 2020, the FCC's Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau issued a declaratory ruling on the P2P Alliance petition (DA 20-670). The Bureau made clear that if a calling platform is not capable of originating a call or sending a text without a person actively and affirmatively manually dialing each one, that platform is not an autodialer, and texts sent with it are not subject to the TCPA's restrictions on calls to wireless phones. The fact that a platform can send a large volume of messages is not, by itself, what makes it an autodialer.

Read the limits carefully. The Bureau did not rule on any specific product, and it confirmed that a platform which can send without a human action per message is still an autodialer. It also confirmed that a sender using an autodialer avoids liability by obtaining prior express consent. So a true P2P tool changes the TCPA analysis, but it does not change the carriers' rules: 10DLC registration, Campaign Verify vetting, opt-out handling, and content rules apply to P2P traffic exactly as they apply to bulk sends. CTIA's political messaging explainer says the consent and opt-out expectations apply to all senders, political message senders included, regardless of whether the TCPA does.

Any organization that sends application-to-person texts from a standard 10-digit number has to register with the carriers' shared registry. The Campaign Registry (TCR) is that system. Your campaign, the brand in TCR's vocabulary, cannot register directly; you register through a Campaign Service Provider, which is your texting vendor or the messaging platform your campaign software uses. The provider registers your brand, then registers each messaging use case, called a campaign, describing what you will send and to whom, with sample messages and the opt-in method. Once the carriers approve, your number is attached to the campaign ID and messages flow.

Political organizations use a special use case reserved for verified political entities. It requires proof that you are who you say you are, which is where Campaign Verify comes in. Budget time for this. Registration and vetting take days to weeks, and the carriers reject vague use-case descriptions and sample messages without opt-out language. A campaign that plans to start texting in October must start registering in August. Nobody can honestly promise you will be texting voters ten minutes after signing up.

• Brand: your committee's legal name, EIN, address, and website, registered by your provider.
• Campaign (use case): what you send, sample messages, how people opt in, how they opt out.
• Political special use case: requires a Campaign Verify authorization token.
• Timeline: days to weeks; start two months before your first send.

Campaign Verify is a nonpartisan nonprofit that verifies the identity of U.S. political campaigns, parties, and PACs so that carriers can tell a real candidate from a spoofer. Any candidate, party, PAC, or political committee with 527 tax-exempt status that is registered with the FEC or with a state, local, or tribal election authority may apply. That includes a city council committee registered with a city clerk. The process is to locate your filing record online, submit a verification request, receive a secure PIN code by mail or through your filing contact, and generate an authorization token that your texting provider submits to TCR.

The fee is $95 per entity per two-year election cycle, with no additional charge for token generation, according to Campaign Verify's site (checked 2026-09-09). Since 2021, carriers have required the token for political entities on 10DLC, and Campaign Verify says the requirement expanded in 2026 to short code and toll-free numbers. If your committee is not yet registered with a filing authority, you cannot be verified, which is one more reason to file the committee paperwork first; see campaign finance basics.

10DLC is not free. Your provider passes through TCR's one-time brand registration fee, a per-campaign vetting fee, a recurring monthly fee for each registered campaign, and per-message surcharges that each carrier adds on top of the provider's own message price. The surcharges are fractions of a cent per message segment, but a 160-character message with a link often runs to two segments and a message with an emoji or an accented character can be billed as more, so the effective cost per text is higher than the headline rate. Ask your provider for the current fee schedule before you budget; the numbers change and vary by carrier.

Throughput is the more common surprise. Carriers cap how many messages a registered brand may send per day, and the cap depends on how the brand was vetted. Twilio's 10DLC documentation, for example, describes a sole-proprietor tier limited to 1,000 message segments per day to T-Mobile, a low-volume standard tier at up to 2,000, and standard brands whose limits rise with their trust score up to unlimited. A verified political campaign is placed in a higher tier than an unvetted small business, which is the practical payoff of the Campaign Verify token. Confirm your daily cap with your provider before you plan a 20,000-message get-out-the-vote send for a single morning.

Every message program must let the recipient stop it, instantly and permanently. The CTIA principles say senders should state in the message how to opt out, use the standardized STOP keyword, and also honor plain-language requests such as stop, end, unsubscribe, cancel, quit, and please opt me out, regardless of capitalization or punctuation. One confirmation message acknowledging the opt-out is allowed; nothing after it.

The FCC codified the same approach in law. Its February 15, 2024 Report and Order (FCC 24-24) provides that consumers may revoke consent in any reasonable manner, that senders may not restrict revocation to a single designated method, that revocation and do-not-call requests must be honored within a reasonable time not to exceed 10 business days, and that a one-time confirmation text is permitted so long as it contains no marketing. Separately, the FCC's December 13, 2023 order on unlawful texts (FCC 23-107) codified that the National Do-Not-Call Registry's protections apply to text messages. Those registry rules are written for telephone solicitations, which the regulations define as pitches to buy goods or services, so a message that sells nothing is outside them; a message selling campaign merchandise or event tickets is not.

In practice, a STOP has to propagate everywhere. If a voter opts out of your texting program, that number must be suppressed from every list your campaign sends to, on every platform, for the life of the campaign, and it must survive re-imports of the voter file. The failure mode is a re-imported vendor file that quietly restores a number someone opted out of last month.

• Every message: include how to opt out, at least in the first message of a conversation.
• Honor STOP and its plain-language cousins immediately; send at most one confirmation.
• Process any revocation within 10 business days at the outside; instantly is the standard.
• Suppress across every list and every tool; re-check after each data import.

The federal rule on timing lives in 47 CFR 64.1200(c)(1): no telephone solicitation before 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m. in the recipient's local time. The regulation's definition of telephone solicitation is commercial, so a purely political text is arguably outside it, but no campaign should rely on that argument. Carriers treat off-hours volume as a spam signal, recipients report a 6 a.m. text as spam, and spam reports get campaigns filtered or shut down. Treat 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. local time as the hard floor and a narrower window, roughly 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., as the practice.

Local time means the recipient's time zone, not yours, which matters for districts that straddle a zone line and for any statewide list. Schedule sends by the recipient's area and hold anything that would land outside the window until the next morning. During a ballot chase, when you are sending to a shrinking list every morning, build the send into the window rather than firing as soon as the overnight list is rebuilt; ballot chase in vote-by-mail states covers that loop.

Several states have their own telephone solicitation statutes, often called mini-TCPAs, and some have laws written specifically for political calls and texts. Florida is the most cited. Its Telephone Solicitation Act, Florida Statute 501.059, covers telephonic sales calls, defined as calls, texts, or voicemails soliciting a sale of consumer goods or services, requires prior express written consent for automated sales messages, and carries the same $500 and $1,500 damages as the federal law. A 2023 amendment added that a recipient must reply STOP and give the sender 15 days to comply before suing over texts. Because the definition is commercial, a pure get-out-the-vote text is generally outside it, but a text selling campaign merchandise may not be.

Florida also regulates political messages directly. Florida Statute 106.147 requires political telephone calls and text messages supporting or opposing a candidate or measure to identify who paid for them, with Paid for by and the sponsor's name, or for texts a link to that disclosure, and makes willful violations a first-degree misdemeanor. Other states have disclosure rules for political robocalls, consent rules that reach political texts, or both. Before your first send, read your state's statute or ask your attorney; the state guides name the campaign finance agency whose advertising rules usually cover texts.

None of this is hard if you do it in order and before you need it. The checklist below is the sequence a well-run local campaign follows; each item maps to a rule above.

• Register the committee with your filing authority so Campaign Verify can find it.
• Get the Campaign Verify token ($95 per two-year cycle) and give it to your texting provider.
• Have your provider register your brand and a political use case with The Campaign Registry; allow weeks.
• Collect cell numbers only from your own supporters with clear opt-in language; keep the records.
• Never text numbers appended by a data vendor with an automated system; use them for volunteer-dialed calls or a true peer-to-peer tool, and only with your attorney's sign-off.
• Identify the campaign in every message and include opt-out instructions.
• Honor STOP instantly, confirm once, suppress everywhere, and re-check after every import.
• Send only between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m. in the recipient's time zone; narrower is better.
• Add the disclosure your state requires on political texts, such as Florida's Paid for by.
• Keep a log of every send: list, message, count, time, and opt-outs received.

1. 1.47 U.S.C. 227, Telephone Consumer Protection Act (autodialer definition, cell phone restriction, private right of action)
2. 2.47 CFR 64.1200, FCC rules implementing the TCPA (consent definitions, 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. rule)
3. 3.FCC, political campaign robocalls and robotexts (consumer guidance)
4. 4.Facebook, Inc. v. Duguid, 592 U.S. ___ (2021), opinion of the Court
5. 5.FCC Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau, Declaratory Ruling on the P2P Alliance petition, DA 20-670 (June 25, 2020)
6. 6.FCC, Report and Order on revocation of consent, FCC 24-24 (adopted February 15, 2024)
7. 7.FCC, Second Report and Order on unlawful text messages, FCC 23-107 (adopted December 13, 2023; DNC registry applies to texts)
8. 8.The Campaign Registry (A2P 10DLC brand and campaign registration)
9. 9.Campaign Verify (political entity verification; eligibility and $95 fee)
10. 10.CTIA, Messaging Principles and Best Practices (May 2023)
11. 11.CTIA, Political Text Messaging explainer (consent and opt-out apply to political senders)
12. 12.Twilio, A2P 10DLC documentation (throughput tiers; one provider's description)
13. 13.Florida Statute 501.059, Florida Telephone Solicitation Act
14. 14.Florida Statute 106.147, disclosure on political telephone calls and text messages