Business texting laws, in plain English

This page is not legal advice. Handlebar is a texting service, not a law firm. What follows is the plain-English shape of the rules as the rulebooks themselves state them, with the source named for each one, so you know what the rules are aimed at and what to ask a lawyer about.

If you are about to send promotional texts to a list - especially a list of people who are not already your customers - that is exactly the moment to talk to one. The rules below are written mostly about that kind of texting.

Most of what a shop texts is about something the customer asked for: a reply to the call they made, a confirmation, an on-the-way text, a question about the job. The other kind is the text that sells: a seasonal special, a tune-up offer, a we-miss-you discount.

The rulebooks treat those two very differently, and nearly every strict rule below is aimed at the second kind. The federal rules under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act define telemarketing as a call or message meant to encourage someone to buy goods or services, and those rules cover text messages as well as calls - the FCC's rule on revoking consent, for example, is written for "calls or text messages."

The strictest federal consent standard, prior express written consent, is attached to marketing calls and texts sent with automated dialing equipment. Whether a particular texting tool counts as that equipment is a legal question with its own court history. The practical answer does not depend on it: get clear, written permission before you send anything promotional.

This is practice, not law, but it keeps you on the right side of the line.

The FCC's rule on revoking consent (47 CFR 64.1200(a)(10)) says a person can revoke consent by any reasonable method. It names the words that count automatically when someone replies to a text: "stop," "quit," "end," "revoke," "opt out," "cancel," or "unsubscribe." If they use other words, the rule says to treat the reply as a stop request if a reasonable person would read it that way - so "please don't text me again" counts. The sender may not make one method the only way to opt out.

The rule gives up to ten business days to honor the request, and it allows one confirmation text afterward, as long as that text only confirms the opt-out, carries no marketing, and is the only message sent. A confirmation sent within five minutes is presumed fine.

My advice is to ignore the ten days. Stop the moment somebody asks. Nothing good comes from the texts you send a person who has already told you to stop.

The federal rule (47 CFR 64.1200(c)(1)) bars telephone solicitations to a residential subscriber before 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m., local time where the person is. The same section says its solicitation rules apply to text messages sent to cell phones.

Read the definition closely and you will see it carves out people who invited the contact and people you already have a business relationship with. Do not build your texting habits on that carve-out. Keep anything that is not urgent inside 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. for everyone. The one real exception in practice is a customer who called you at 10 p.m. about water on the floor - they started that conversation, and they want the answer now.

The same federal section bars telephone solicitations to numbers on the national Do Not Call registry, says those registrations must be honored indefinitely, and applies that rule to text messages sent to cell phones.

The established business relationship exception is defined narrowly: a purchase or transaction with you in the past 18 months, or an inquiry in the past three months, and it ends early if the person asks you specifically not to contact them. So a win-back text to a customer from two years ago is not automatically covered just because they were once a customer. That is one more reason to get marketing permission in writing while the job is fresh.

Texas passed SB 140, which took effect September 1, 2025. It changed the definition of "telephone solicitation" in Chapter 302 of the Texas Business and Commerce Code to include a text message or image "initiated by a seller or salesperson to induce a person to purchase, rent, claim, or receive an item." Chapter 302 requires a seller to hold a state registration certificate to make telephone solicitations to purchasers in Texas (Section 302.101). SB 140 also made violations of the state's telemarketing chapter deceptive trade practices, which opens the door to private lawsuits.

Chapter 302 has exemptions, and one is worth reading closely if you run a shop. Section 302.058 says the chapter does not apply to soliciting a contract for the maintenance or repair of an item the customer previously bought from you, or to a business soliciting a former or current customer if it has operated under the same business name for at least two years.

Read literally, that describes a lot of what a shop sends to its own customers. Whether it covers your specific texts is a question for a Texas lawyer, not for this page - and law firms have written about further developments since the law took effect. If you plan to text promotions to anyone who is not already your customer, stop and ask one first.

Separate from the law, carriers require business texting to be registered before it flows reliably, and unregistered business traffic gets filtered. It is paperwork about who you are and what you send, and texts that never arrive help nobody. We walk through that step in our guide to texting from a business landline.

None of this is complicated if you keep the two kinds of text separate.

Handlebar's core texts start with somebody who called your shop: when a call goes unanswered, it texts that caller back to answer questions and help book the job. Our SMS terms spell out the rest in plain language - related messages like confirmations, reminders, review requests, and occasional we-miss-you follow-ups; that replying STOP gets one confirmation and then the texts stop; and that nobody is enrolled in unrelated marketing lists through the service.

The same terms say plainly that shops are responsible for obtaining the consents required to message the people they ask Handlebar to contact. If you are weighing win-back or promotional texts, bring it up on the call so we can talk through how it would run - and bring it up with your lawyer too.