Why is compliance important?
Because the FTC has been writing checks with a lot of zeros on them for over twenty years, and it's not going to stop just because your dialer's out of date.
Because the fines are real, and they flow downhill.
Telemarketing in the U.S. is governed by two big rules: the TCPA(the law that says you can't auto- dial someone's cell phone without consent) and the FTC Telemarketing Sales Rule(the one that caps abandoned calls at 3% and says you can't call before 8 AM or after 9 PM in the lead's time zone, among other things).
Break them, and the penalties are not small. TCPA: $500–$1,500 per call. TSR: up to $53,088 per violation, the FTC's current inflation-adjusted maximum as of January 2025. When the FTC settles with a serial offender, the numbers tend to have a lot of zeros. There have been individual settlements over $200 million in the last decade. There have been settlements over $500 million.
The short list.
3% ABANDON CAP
If you're running predictive, you cannot abandon more than 3% of answered calls over any 30-day rolling window. FTC rule. Not negotiable.
8 AM – 9 PM LOCAL
No outbound calls outside that window in the called party's time zone. Some states are stricter. We enforce this automatically.
DNC SCRUBBING
You can't call numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry. Your responsibility as the seller to scrub before upload.
PRIOR EXPRESS WRITTEN CONSENT
Consent has to be in writing, signed, and clearly disclosed. (A stricter "one-to-one" rule almost took effect in January 2025 but was struck down by the courts days before it started — worth watching in case the FCC tries again.)
STIR/SHAKEN
Carriers now attest to whether outbound calls are legitimate. We provision through Telnyx with full attestation enabled.
RECORDED NOTICE ON ABANDON
If an abandoned call does happen, the seller must be identified via a brief recorded notice. We play this automatically.
Why most legacy dialers don't really care.
Here's the thing nobody in this industry wants to say out loud: a lot of the big-name legacy dialers canrun non-compliant configurations. Some of them ship by default with abandon rates well above 3%. Some don't enforce the calling-time window in software — they leave it up to the campaign owner to remember. Some make AMD an optional add-on.
Why? Because they're big enough to absorb the occasional fine, and because the actual liability tends to land on the seller, not the platform. They have lawyers on retainer. They've been doing this for fifteen years. The fines are a line item.
That's not a moral failing — it's a business decision with measurable trade-offs. But the trade-off works for them, not necessarily for you. If a class- action TCPA suit lands on your campaign, "my dialer let me do it" is not a defense that holds up in court.
Compliance baked in, not bolted on.
We built DialerSeat with compliance enforcement at the architecture level, not as a configurable feature you can turn off when nobody's looking.
HARD 8 AM – 9 PM ENFORCEMENT
Every outbound call checks the lead's local time zone before it fires. Outside the window? Skipped, with a TCPA_BLOCKED disposition. You don't have to remember.
AUTO-DEGRADE AT 2.5%
Predictive abandon-rate monitoring runs every 5 seconds. Hit 2.5% on the rolling 30-day window and the controller cuts you back to 1× lines automatically.
AMD ON BY DEFAULT
Progressive and predictive get AMD pre-screen automatically. The recorded notice on abandoned calls is configured per campaign with a sensible default already in place.
FULL RECORDS, 24 MONTHS
Every dial, every AMD result, every disposition, every abandon — stored and exportable. The TSR's 24-month record-keeping requirement is handled.
We're also transparent about what we don'tdo for you: DNC scrubbing is still the seller's responsibility, and consent records are too. We've written about that split honestly on the how we keep compliance page.
Pick a dialer that takes the rules seriously.
Compliance isn't a feature you should be excited about. It's the cost of being allowed to do outbound at all. The dialers that treat it like an afterthought are betting that the bill won't come — and that if it does, it'll land on you, not them.
We'd rather build it correctly the first time. It's cheaper for everyone involved, and it lets us sleep at night.
Other explainers
Compliance shouldn't be the thing that wakes you up at 3 AM.
We enforce the rules in software so you don't have to remember them. $35/week per seat, every mode included, no contract.