Contractors hear “TCPA” and picture a lawsuit. Then they either stop texting customers entirely, which costs them jobs, or they ignore it completely, which is worse. The actual rule of thumb is simpler than the fear around it.
General information for contractors, not legal advice. If you are running a large SMS program or you have already had a complaint, talk to a lawyer who does this for a living.
The one-sentence version
If they contacted you first, texting them back about the thing they contacted you about is normal business communication. If you went and found them, you need real permission.
That is the whole shape of it. The rules exist to stop mass unsolicited marketing to strangers — the robotexts everyone hates. They were never designed to stop a fence company from replying to someone who just dialed their number.
What “they contacted you first” covers
In each case the person handed you their number with the obvious expectation of hearing back. Replying to that is what they wanted.
What it does not cover
This is where contractors get in trouble, and it is almost never the missed-call text-back. It is the moment somebody sells them a spreadsheet.
Keep the reply on-topic
Existing-inquiry consent is scoped to the inquiry. Someone called about a fence, so text them about the fence. That same consent does not authorize a spring gutter-cleaning promotion six months later. If you want to run actual marketing campaigns to past customers, that is a different consent, collected separately, in writing, with the marketing purpose stated plainly.
STOP means stop, immediately and forever
STOP, UNSUBSCRIBE, CANCEL, QUIT, END. If somebody sends one of those, texting has to end right then, automatically, without anyone at your company deciding whether they meant it. Any decent platform handles this for you and keeps the suppression permanently. If yours does not, you have the wrong platform.
Quiet hours
Do not send automated texts outside roughly 8am to 9pm in the recipient’s local time, and check your state — several are stricter, and a few restrict Sundays. Note the phrase “recipient’s local time.” If you are in Maryland working a job near a state line, that matters.
People will tell you a genuine immediate reply to someone who called at 9:40pm is a different animal from a scheduled marketing blast, and there is an argument there. We did not build on it. Our platform holds every automated send until 8am in the recipient’s time zone, including the missed-call reply, and there is no switch to turn that off. A quiet window you can override is not a quiet window.
A2P 10DLC: the part nobody explains
Separate from TCPA, and it is a carrier requirement rather than a law. Since 2021 the US carriers require any business sending application-to-person messages over standard 10-digit numbers to register: who the business is, what kind of messages it sends, and sample message content. That is A2P 10DLC.
Unregistered traffic gets filtered, throttled, or silently dropped. That last one is the dangerous part — your texts appear to send and simply never arrive, and nobody tells you.
Registration needs your legal business name, your EIN (sole proprietors have a path too), your business address and your website. Published carrier turnaround runs anywhere from a day to about three weeks depending on the carriers and how clean the submission is. Filing it for every customer as part of setup is our job, not yours — the whole process, and exactly where we are with it, is on our compliance page.
The short checklist
Follow those six and you are doing what a careful business does. The homeowner who called you at 2pm and got a text back at 2:00:05 is not going to sue you. She is going to reply.
