Is mass texting legal? The rules every business must follow

Yes, mass texting is legal in the US. Thousands of businesses send the same text to thousands of people every day without breaking any law. The trouble starts with who the texts go to, how those people agreed, when the texts land and which route they travel. Get those wrong and a 5,000-contact campaign can turn into 5,000 separate violations, each worth $500 to $1,500 under the TCPA.

This post explains the rules that apply to a mass text. It covers the federal law, the carrier requirements that act like law, the state statutes that are stricter than both, and what we built into Ready to handle the mechanical parts. It is not legal advice. Compliance is ultimately the sender's responsibility, and if your list or use case is unusual, a TCPA attorney is worth the hour.

The short answer: legal, with four conditions

A mass text is legal when all four of these are true:

1. The recipient consented to texts from you, in the form the message type requires.
2. Your traffic is registered with the carriers (10DLC for standard local numbers).
3. You honor opt-outs right away and permanently.
4. You send inside allowed hours for the recipient's time zone and state.

Each condition is enforced by a different party. Federal regulators and private plaintiffs enforce consent and hours. Carriers enforce registration. State attorneys general and plaintiffs' firms enforce the stricter state rules. Most compliance mistakes come from covering one of these parties and ignoring the others.

Consent: the rule that carries the money

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act is the federal law that covers texts. Courts and the FCC have treated a text as a "call" for TCPA purposes for years. We cover the history in Does the TCPA apply to text messages?.

The practical split is between two kinds of message:

• Marketing texts (promos, sales, "come back and save 20%") need prior express written consent. That means a clear agreement, usually a checkbox or a keyword opt-in tied to disclosure language, that the person agreed to receive marketing texts from you.
• Informational texts (appointment reminders, order updates, account alerts) need prior express consent. Giving you a phone number in the context of the transaction is often enough.

The difference matters, and we go through it in detail in Prior express written consent vs implied consent for texting.

What doesn't count as consent

• A number scraped from a website or a directory
• A purchased list from a vendor that can't show you the opt-in record
• A customer who gave you their number for delivery, and who you now want to send promotions
• An old list from a previous business or a previous consent wording

Our stance is simple: cold outreach goes by phone and mail, and SMS goes to people who consented or who replied to you first. We don't treat a cold-list campaign as normal practice, and you shouldn't either. The per-text statutory damages are the reason.

Keep your own consent record

Your signup form, checkout flow or keyword opt-in should store, for each contact, the time they opted in, the exact wording they saw and the page or source. That record is your defense if a complaint arrives. A sending platform can log that you attested to consent, but it can't recreate what the contact saw on your site.

10DLC registration: the carrier rule that works like law

10DLC (10-digit long code) registration is not a statute, but carriers enforce it as if it were. If you text from a standard local number without a registered brand and campaign, the carriers filter or block your messages. Your texts don't get delivered, and you may never get an error that tells you why. For who has to register and why, see Is 10DLC a law? Who has to register and why.

Registration covers two things:

• Brand: who you are (legal name, EIN, address, website).
• Campaign: what you send (use case, sample messages, how people opt in, your opt-out language).

Carriers check that your opt-in description matches what you send. If you register a "customer care" campaign and then send promos, that mismatch can get your campaign suspended.

What registration costs on Ready

Registration runs in the app with no setup fee. You pay the first month at submit, which is $25. After that, the monthly cost is $25/mo for registration and $2 per number. Most approvals take 2 to 7 days.

If you need to send while your registration is in review, you have two options. An account can send up to 500 texts a month before it registers, at its normal per-text rate. An account that bought a number before registering sends on our shared registration at the same rate until its own is approved. The first 20 texts are free one-to-one sends. Use them before you register, because they end when a registration is paid for.

State rules: where "federally fine" isn't enough

Several states have their own telemarketing laws, sometimes called "mini-TCPAs." These laws can be stricter than the federal rules. Florida's Telephone Solicitation Act (FTSA) and Oklahoma's similar statute are the ones most often cited. Depending on the state and the type of message, they can add requirements such as:

• Narrower sending windows. Some states use a shorter window than the federal one.
• Frequency caps on solicitations about the same subject within a 24-hour period.
• Consent requirements that apply to automated sales texts even where federal case law has narrowed what counts as an autodialer.

State laws change, and they apply based on where the recipient is, not where you are. Our TCPA calling hours by state guide lists the stricter windows. A safe default for any multi-state list is to send between roughly 10 AM and 7 PM in the recipient's local time.

One more category needs extra care. If your mass texts are advocacy alerts (call your rep, sign a petition), donation appeals or messages to voters, email support@tryready.com before your first send and wait for our reply. Signing up and registering is not enough on its own for those use cases under our acceptable use policy.

The rules at a glance

What it costs to send compliantly: a worked example

Assume a retailer with 5,000 opted-in customers sends a 140-character promo with no emoji. That is 1 segment per contact. Ready's Standard rate is $0.0075 per segment, plus a $0.0045 carrier fee per segment.

• Segment cost: 5,000 × $0.0075 = $38
• Carrier fees: 5,000 × $0.0045, itemized separately on the bill

Now add the optional compliance features. TCPA/DNC scrubbing and landline validation are each $0.003 per segment when switched on for the account. Both are off by default, and the quoted rate above excludes them.

• Scrubbing on: 5,000 segments × $0.003 each
• Landline validation on: 5,000 segments × $0.003 each

Add an emoji and the math changes. If that 140-character text includes one emoji, the segment limit drops to 70 characters (67 per part for multipart messages), so the text becomes 3 segments. The segment cost becomes 5,000 × 3 × $0.0075 = $113, before carrier fees, and the per-segment scrub surcharge triples too.

Compare that scrub to one plaintiff who sues over a single text at $500 to $1,500. The scrub pays for itself if it prevents one claim. It is risk reduction, not immunity. A scrubbed list with bad consent is still a bad list.

How a compliant send looks through the API

If you send from your own software, here is how the API handles each rule. POST /v1/messages/bulk takes up to 100 recipients per call. Split larger lists into batches, and send an Idempotency-Key header so a retried request never sends twice.

POST https://api.tryready.com/v1/messages/bulk
X-API-Key: <key>
Idempotency-Key: 6f1c2a9e-3b7d-4c1a-9e2f-0a5b8c7d1e24

{"to": ["+12125550199", "+15559876543"], "body": "Spring sale: 20% off through Sunday. Reply STOP to opt out.", "consent_attested": true}

• consent_attested is your promise that these recipients agreed to receive texts. It goes into the audit trail with who sent, to how many and when.
• Opt-outs and numbers on your Ban list are refused up front and not charged.
• Landlines that Ready's own send logs already show are refused up front on every account, free. Landline validation, which checks every send, is optional.
• Quiet hours: a text sent during the recipient's quiet hours is held and sent later, and it is charged only when it sends. Campaigns, drip campaigns and automations wait up to 24 hours for the window; a one-to-one or API text is held only if the window opens within 6 hours, otherwise it is refused and must be resent; a one-to-one reply to someone who texted you in the last 24 hours goes out at any hour.

Full details are at docs.tryready.com/api/bulk-messages.

Where Ready's help stops

We handle the mechanical parts:

• Registration
• STOP handling
• Quiet hours
• Scrubbing
• The send-level attestation log

We can't make a bad list good. If your consent wording didn't mention marketing texts, or you bought numbers from a vendor who can't produce opt-in records, no platform setting fixes that. Raw carrier APIs can handle the sending too, and some teams are happy wiring up compliance themselves. What we offer is that these checks are built in, so you don't have to build them: STOP handling, quiet hours and the registration check run on every send, and scrubbing is there for you to switch on.

The practical takeaway

Mass texting is legal when you have the right consent, a registered route, instant opt-out handling and sends inside allowed hours. Before your next campaign:

1. Confirm you can produce the opt-in record for every number on the list.
2. Match your message type to the consent you collected.
3. Register your brand and campaign.
4. Check state hours for where your recipients live.

If you want those checks built into the sending, you can create an account, use your 20 free texts to test one-to-one, and then register.