The short answer
Federal rules permit telephone solicitations between 8am and 9pm in the called party’s time zone, and several states are tighter than that. The mistake almost every expanding floor makes is running the dialler on office hours — a 9am start on the east coast is a 6am call in California, which is a violation before anyone has said anything.
This is the cheapest compliance failure to avoid and one of the most common, because it is invisible from inside a single-office floor. Nobody in the room is doing anything unusual; the dialler is simply calling people for whom it is the wrong time.
| Office time (ET) | What it is in PT | Permitted? |
|---|---|---|
| 8:00am | 5:00am | No |
| 9:00am | 6:00am | No |
| 11:00am | 8:00am | Yes |
| 5:00pm | 2:00pm | Yes |
| 9:00pm | 6:00pm | Yes |
The east-to-west problem is a morning problem and the west-to-east problem is an evening one. A California floor calling New York at 5pm local is calling at 8pm, which is inside the federal window and outside some state ones.
Configure it once, properly
- Store the merchant’s state or area-code time zone on the record at ingestion, not at dial time.
- Set the dialler to derive the window from that field, with the strictest applicable rule.
- Apply the same window to texts unless you have checked that the state treats them differently.
- Hold a hard stop rather than a soft warning. A warning is something a rep dismisses.
The commercial argument is the same
Calls placed at 6am do not fund deals. They wake people up, they burn a record you paid for, and they produce exactly the complaints that lead to suppression requests and worse. The compliance case and the conversion case point the same direction here, which is not true of every rule.