State texting laws

Read this first: not legal advice

This page is general information for operators, not legal advice, and Blue Reacher is not your lawyer. State legislatures and courts change these rules every session. Have counsel review your program against the states you actually send into. The federal baseline is covered in the compliance guide.

Why state law matters more than federal law here

Federal TCPA claims got harder after Facebook v. Duguid narrowed the autodialer definition. State mini-TCPA statutes filled the gap. Several of them define restricted equipment more broadly than the federal statute, carry their own damages, and let individuals sue directly. A campaign that clears the TCPA can still generate claims in Florida, Oklahoma, Washington, or Maryland.

The practical rule: your compliance floor is set by the strictest state on your list, not by federal law.

The states that change how you send

Florida

The Florida Telephone Solicitation Act (Fla. Stat. § 501.059), as amended in 2021 and narrowed in 2023, restricts calls and texts made with an automated system for selecting or dialing numbers. Key operational points:

1. Quiet hours are 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. local time, tighter than the federal 8 a.m. to 9 p.m.
2. No more than three commercial messages within 24 hours on the same subject.
3. Private right of action with statutory damages of $500 per violation, trebled for willful violations.

The 2023 amendment (HB 761) added a requirement that a recipient reply STOP for certain claims to proceed, which reduced but did not eliminate exposure.

Oklahoma

The Oklahoma Telephone Solicitation Act, effective November 1, 2022, mirrors Florida's structure closely: 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. local time, a private right of action, and $500 per violation with trebling. Treat Florida and Oklahoma as one rule set when you build send windows.

Washington

Washington's Commercial Electronic Mail Act and its texting provisions (RCW 19.190) make an unsolicited commercial text an actionable practice under the state Consumer Protection Act, with $500 per message available. Washington also treats misleading sender information as a separate violation, which is why sender identification matters, see sender identity.

Maryland, New York, and others

Maryland's Stop the Spam Calls Act of 2023 tracks the vacated federal one-to-one consent concept at state level, meaning consent obtained by a lead vendor for a list of unnamed sellers is unlikely to hold. New York's General Business Law § 399-p regulates automated messages and requires disclosure of the calling entity. Both reward the same behavior: named-seller consent and clear identification.

California

California does not have a texting-specific mini-TCPA, but Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code § 17538.41 restricts unsolicited commercial text messages, and the CCPA and CPRA govern the contact data itself. If your list came from a data broker, California residents on it carry data-rights obligations independent of texting law, including deletion requests.

Practical operating rules

Rather than maintaining fifty rule sets, most operators run one conservative program that clears all of them:

1. Send 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. recipient local time, weekdays. Inside every state's window with margin, and it performs better anyway.
2. Cap at three commercial messages per contact per rolling 24 hours, and in practice far fewer, see follow-up cadence in deliverability.
3. Identify the sender and the company in the first message from a new line.
4. Use named-seller consent. Consent that lists "our marketing partners" fails in Maryland and is weak everywhere.
5. Honor any revocation across every line and channel in your account, which the platform enforces automatically, see opt-out handling.
6. Keep consent and revocation records for five years.

Determining recipient location

Area code is not location. A number with a 212 area code can belong to someone living in Miami, which puts your 8:30 p.m. Eastern send inside Florida's restricted window at 8:30 p.m. local. Where you hold a billing address, a shipping address, or a stated location, use it. Where you do not, hold sends to the narrowest window that is safe across the plausible zones, which in practice means finishing by 6 p.m. Pacific.

Before you launch in a new state

• Check whether the state has a mini-TCPA with a private right of action
• Check the quiet-hours window and take the stricter of state and federal
• Check whether the state requires specific disclosure language in the first message
• Check per-day message caps
• Confirm your consent language names your company specifically
• Have counsel confirm all of the above, because this page is not legal advice

Primary sources

• Florida Telephone Solicitation Act, Fla. Stat. § 501.059, as amended by HB 761 (2023)
• Oklahoma Telephone Solicitation Act, effective November 1, 2022
• Washington RCW 19.190 and the Washington Consumer Protection Act
• Maryland Stop the Spam Calls Act of 2023
• New York General Business Law § 399-p
• California Bus. & Prof. Code § 17538.41