Definition
Calling-hour restrictions are federal and state rules that limit the times of day when certain calls may be placed, led by the federal ban on telephone solicitations before 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m. in the called party's local time.
At the federal level, both the FCC's TCPA rules and the FTC's Telemarketing Sales Rule prohibit telephone solicitation calls before 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m., measured at the called party's location. The federal window applies to solicitations rather than purely informational calls, though many healthcare programs apply it, or a narrower window, to all outbound contact.
Several states are stricter. Florida's and Oklahoma's telephone solicitation acts, for example, limit solicitation calls to 8 a.m. through 8 p.m. local time and cap how many calls can be made to the same person on the same subject in 24 hours, and some states also restrict calls on Sundays or holidays. See mini-TCPA laws.
Applying these rules is harder than it looks, because a phone number no longer reliably shows where a person is: patients keep their numbers when they move, so an area code can sit several time zones away from the handset. A cautious approach checks both the patient's address of record and the number's area code and calls only when both fall inside the permitted window. Calling-hour rules also interact with frequency limits, such as the conditions attached to the FCC's healthcare exemption.
How Consig handles it
Timing rules the law imposes, such as state calling-hour restrictions, are enforced by Consig's compliance engine on each call. When a patient answers at a bad time, Consig's agent can schedule the call for later.