TL;DR

  • Do-Not-Call compliance runs on two separate lists, not one: the National Do-Not-Call Registry maintained by the FTC, and the internal, company-specific suppression list every telemarketer is currently required to keep and honor. Missing either is an independent violation.
  • A Federal Communications Commission rulemaking opened in October 2025 (CG Docket Nos. 17-59 and 02-278) proposes to eliminate the internal company-specific DNC requirement, drop the call-abandonment rule, and roll back the “all-or-nothing” consent-revocation rule. None of that has taken effect. Treating a proposal as a rule is how outbound teams end up as the test case.
  • The Supreme Court’s 2025 decision in McLaughlin Chiropractic Associates, Inc. v. McKesson Corp. means federal courts are no longer bound to defer to the FCC’s reading of the statute. So even where the agency deregulates, a plaintiff can argue — and a court can independently hold — that the underlying statute still requires more.
  • Courts are extending DNC protection to cell phones used for personal purposes. In McGonigle v. Dickey’s Barbecue Restaurants, Inc. (E.D. Va. July 22, 2026), the court held that a wireless number used for household purposes can be a “residential” line for DNC purposes, keeping the class claim alive past a motion to dismiss.
  • The record that resolves a DNC dispute is the same record that resolves a consent dispute: proof of what the consumer saw, an affirmative action, an immutable timestamp, the named seller, and an unbroken chain of custody from the consent event to the number actually dialed or texted. “Scrubbed against the registry” is a process; the defensible artifact is the evidence.

Overview: Two Lists, One Liability

Most outbound teams think of “Do Not Call” as a single scrub — run the list against the National Registry, drop the matches, dial the rest. That mental model is incomplete, and the gap is where the litigation lives.

The federal Do-Not-Call regime is built from two independent obligations. The first is the National Do-Not-Call Registry, a database of consumers who have asked, once and universally, not to receive telemarketing calls. The second is the company-specific rule: separate from the national list, a company that makes telemarketing calls must maintain its own internal suppression list and honor a consumer’s request to that specific company to stop calling — even if the consumer never registered nationally.

These are different duties with different triggers. A consumer who never joined the National Registry can still sustain a company-specific claim if they told your company to stop and your company called again. A consumer on the National Registry can sustain a national-list claim even if they never spoke to you. The obligations do not collapse into each other, and a compliance program that satisfies one while ignoring the other is exposed on the axis it ignored.

Layered on top of both is the consent question. A consumer on the National Registry can still be called if they have given prior express invitation or permission — an established business relationship or a written agreement, depending on the call type. Which means the registry scrub does not end the analysis; it starts it. The decisive question is not whether the number appeared on a list but whether you can prove the consumer authorized the contact anyway. That is a records problem, and it is the same records problem the rest of the outbound-compliance framework keeps arriving at.

The Federal Framework: What the Rules Require Today

The rules below are in effect now. The next section covers what the FCC has proposed to change — but proposals are not defenses, and the current rules govern every call placed until a final rule says otherwise.

The National Do-Not-Call Registry

Telemarketers may not call a number on the National Registry absent an applicable exception. Sellers must subscribe to the registry, scrub their calling lists against it, and honor registrations. Under the FTC’s Telemarketing Sales Rule, a seller has a safe harbor only if it can demonstrate a written compliance policy, training, and — critically — that it accessed the registry no more than 31 days before the call and maintained records documenting that process. The safe harbor is not automatic; it is an evidentiary showing the defendant has to make.

The Company-Specific (Internal) Do-Not-Call List

Independently of the national list, a company must honor a consumer’s direct request that this company stop calling. That request must be recorded and suppressed within a reasonable time, and the suppression must persist. The company-specific right exists precisely to catch the situation the national list misses: a consumer who is fine with telemarketing generally but wants one particular caller to stop. Internal-list claims are common in litigation because they do not require the plaintiff to have registered nationally — they only require that the plaintiff asked, and the company failed to suppress.

Calling Hours, Identification, and Abandonment

Federal rules restrict telemarketing to the hours between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m. in the called party’s time zone — a frequent trap for national campaigns dialing from a single location. Callers must identify themselves and, for prerecorded messages, provide a callback number. And the current call-abandonment rule prohibits abandoning more than three percent of answered calls, measured over a period, with a live representative required to come on the line within two seconds of the recipient’s greeting.

Wireless Numbers Are Not a Loophole

The old intuition that Do-Not-Call rules protect only landlines is being actively dismantled in court. In McGonigle v. Dickey’s Barbecue Restaurants, Inc., No. 1:25-cv-01062 (E.D. Va. July 22, 2026), the plaintiff alleged he received unsolicited promotional texts after registering his cell number on the National Registry. The defendant moved to dismiss on the theory that DNC protections apply only to “residential” telephones and a cell phone does not qualify. The court rejected that argument, holding that a cell phone may plausibly be treated as residential when it is used primarily for personal, household purposes — noting the FCC’s recognition that many consumers have abandoned landlines entirely and that extending the full range of TCPA protections to wireless subscribers is “more consistent with the overall intent of the TCPA.”

The practical lesson is not that every cell phone is a residential line. It is that the residential/wireless line is a fact question a plaintiff can plead around, and a program that treats mobile numbers as categorically outside the DNC regime is building its defense on a distinction courts are increasingly unwilling to draw.

The 2026 Rulemaking: What the FCC Has Proposed to Change

On October 7, 2025, the FCC released a Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (CG Docket Nos. 17-59 and 02-278) proposing to streamline or eliminate several long-standing telemarketing rules. For outbound teams, three proposals matter most — and all three are proposals, not rules.

1. Eliminating the Company-Specific DNC Requirement

The FCC proposed to eliminate or streamline the internal company-specific DNC obligation, reasoning that the National Registry and the consent-revocation rules already give consumers adequate protection. If finalized, this would remove one of the two lists outbound teams currently have to maintain.

Two cautions. First, it is not final; the company-specific rule is live law today. Second, even the FCC’s own framing concedes that a caller would still have to track and honor individual consent revocations — which, as the agency acknowledges, is functionally the same exercise as maintaining an internal suppression list. Eliminating the label does not eliminate the work.

2. Dropping the Call-Abandonment and Predictive-Dialer Rules

The FCC proposed to eliminate the prohibition on abandoning calls before 15 seconds or four rings, and to remove the requirement that predictive-dialer campaigns keep a live agent available for at least 97 percent of answered calls. The rationale is that dialers have grown efficient enough that these rules no longer target a meaningful source of consumer harm. Whether this survives comment — and whether the FTC’s parallel Telemarketing Sales Rule abandonment provisions move in lockstep — is unresolved.

The revocation rule that took effect in 2025 provides that when a consumer opts out, the revocation applies broadly across a caller’s communications — opt out of one marketing channel and you are opted out of the caller’s marketing generally. The current FCC has expressed concern that this sweeps too broadly, cutting off wanted communications from callers a consumer interacts with in multiple capacities. The FNPRM seeks comment on letting consumers revoke by category or type of service, and on whether businesses may designate an exclusive method for revocation rather than honoring any “reasonable means.”

Until a final rule issues, the broad revocation rule controls. A program that starts honoring category-limited opt-outs today, on the strength of a proposal, is honoring a rule that does not yet exist.

Why Deregulation Is Not the Same as Safety

There is a natural temptation to read a deregulatory rulemaking as permission to relax. Two developments make that read dangerous.

The first is McLaughlin Chiropractic Associates, Inc. v. McKesson Corp. (2025), in which the Supreme Court held that the Hobbs Act does not require federal district courts to defer to the FCC’s interpretation of the TCPA in private litigation. Courts must now independently determine whether the agency’s actions square with the statute. The consequence cuts both ways: a plaintiff can challenge an FCC rule as too permissive, and a court can agree. So even if the FCC rescinds a rule, a defendant cannot treat the rescission as a statutory safe harbor — the underlying statute is what a court will independently apply.

The second is enforcement momentum at the state level. The Anti-Robocall Litigation Task Force — a coalition of state attorneys general working with the FCC — has continued active enforcement against illegal calling and mitigation failures. Federal deregulation does not bind state attorneys general, and it does not touch the state mini-TCPA statutes that regulate the same conduct on their own terms. Florida, Washington, Oklahoma, and Maryland all maintain telemarketing statutes with their own do-not-call and consent provisions, several with private rights of action and statutory damages that do not depend on any federal rule remaining in place.

The net position for 2026: the federal floor may be lowering in places, the state overlay is not, the courts are no longer deferring to the agency, and the plaintiffs’ bar is actively testing the boundaries. Relaxing a compliance program to match the most permissive reading of a proposed federal rule is the highest-risk posture available.

A Practical Do-Not-Call Compliance Checklist

Use this as an operational baseline for any team placing outbound calls or texts.

  • Subscribe and scrub against the National Registry on a documented cadence — no less than every 31 days — and keep the access records that support the safe harbor. The scrub is worthless in litigation if you cannot prove when it happened.
  • Maintain an internal company-specific suppression list and process stop requests promptly, regardless of the pending rulemaking. Treat this as live law until a final rule says otherwise.
  • Honor consent revocations broadly under the current rule, and log the revocation event — channel, timestamp, and scope — the same way you log the original consent.
  • Enforce calling hours in the called party’s time zone, not the caller’s. Build time-zone logic off the area code and, where possible, verified location — not the campaign’s home office.
  • Treat mobile numbers as in-scope. Do not build a program that assumes wireless numbers sit outside the DNC regime; courts are extending residential protection to personal-use cell phones.
  • Screen against known-litigant and reassigned-number data before dialing. A disconnected-and-reassigned number is a stranger who never consented to anything.
  • Preserve the consent artifact for every exception you rely on. If you are calling a registered number under an established-business-relationship or written-consent exception, the exception is only as good as your ability to produce the record proving it.
  • Document the chain of custody from the consent or opt-in event to the specific number contacted. A scrub proves you checked a list; the chain of custody proves the number you dialed is the number the consumer authorized.

Where Do-Not-Call Compliance Actually Fails

The recurring failure mode in DNC litigation is not that a company skipped the registry scrub. Most defendants scrub. The failures cluster in the gaps between the scrub and the record:

  • The internal list that was never really maintained. A consumer asked a company to stop, the request lived in one representative’s notes or one system, and the suppression never propagated to the dialer. The company-specific claim survives because the plaintiff can show the request and the subsequent call.
  • The exception that can’t be proven. A number was on the registry but called under a claimed business relationship or prior consent — and when the complaint lands, the company can produce a spreadsheet row saying “consent: yes” but not the rendered disclosure, the timestamp, or the seller the consumer actually agreed to hear from. An assertion of consent is not evidence of consent.
  • The reassigned number. The consumer who consented gave up the number; a new subscriber received the call. The consent record, if there even is one, points to a person who no longer holds the line.
  • The time-zone miss. A national campaign dialed a 9:30 p.m. local call because the logic keyed off the caller’s office hours, not the recipient’s area code.
  • The broken chain of custody. The consent was captured somewhere upstream — by a publisher, an affiliate, a prior owner of the list — and by the time the number reaches the dialer, no one can trace an unbroken line from the consent event to the call. The proof burden runs to the caller, and the caller cannot carry it because the record is not theirs and was never preserved.

Every one of these is an evidentiary failure, not a scrubbing failure. The scrub is necessary and not sufficient. What decides the case is whether, years after the call, you can reconstruct exactly what authorized it.

Key Takeaways

  • Do-Not-Call is two lists, not one. The National Registry and the internal company-specific list are independent obligations with independent liability. A program that honors one and neglects the other is exposed on the axis it neglected.
  • The 2026 rulemaking changes proposals, not rules. The FCC has proposed to eliminate the company-specific list, drop the abandonment rule, and narrow the revocation rule — but until a final rule issues, the current, stricter rules govern every call you place.
  • Deregulation is not a safe harbor. After McLaughlin, courts independently apply the statute rather than deferring to the FCC. A rescinded rule is not a defense if a court reads the statute to require more, and state mini-TCPAs and attorneys general are unaffected by federal rollback.
  • Wireless numbers are in scope. McGonigle v. Dickey’s Barbecue is the current reminder that personal-use cell phones can be treated as residential lines for DNC purposes. Do not build a program on the opposite assumption.
  • The scrub is a process; the record is the defense. DNC cases are lost in the gap between checking a list and proving what authorized the call. The artifact that resolves the dispute is the same one that resolves any consent dispute: rendered disclosure, affirmative action, immutable timestamp, named seller, and an unbroken chain of custody to the number actually contacted.

Do-Not-Call compliance ultimately turns on the same question as every other corner of the outbound framework: not whether you followed a process, but whether you can prove what authorized the contact — long after the call, when the only thing that matters is the record. See how consent and contact authorization can be documented as verifiable, independent proof rather than an after-the-fact assertion.