Quiet hours reference
Federal quiet hours run 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. in the recipient's local time. That sounds like a thirteen-hour window and it is not. The moment your list crosses a time zone the window starts closing from both ends, and a simultaneous send to the contiguous United States has ten hours, not thirteen. This page does that arithmetic for whichever zones you actually text.
Tick the zones your contact list reaches, then pick the clock you schedule against.
11:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. Eastern
A ten-hour window.
No person or entity shall initiate any telephone solicitation to any residential telephone subscriber before the hour of 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m. (local time at the called party's location). 47 CFR 64.1200(c)(1)
Two words in that sentence do the work. Local time at the called party's location means the clock that matters is the one on the recipient's wall, not the one in your office and not the one on the server. And telephone solicitation is a defined term, not a synonym for any message: the same section defines it as a call or message made to encourage a purchase, rental or investment, and excludes contact made with the recipient's prior express invitation or permission, contact within an established business relationship, and contact by a tax-exempt nonprofit.
The FCC treats a text message as a call for TCPA purposes, which is why the quiet-hours window is the working baseline for texting rather than a rule that only ever applied to the telephone.
Because quiet hours attach to a telephone solicitation, and because that definition excludes contact made with prior express invitation or permission, there is a real argument that a marketing text sent to someone who opted in is outside the rule entirely. The Ecommerce Innovation Alliance asked the FCC to say so. The Commission released a Public Notice seeking comment on 11 March 2025, the comment period closed, and no declaratory ruling has issued.
So the honest answer is that nobody knows yet, and in the meantime quiet-hours class actions over marketing texts have become a real and growing category. We are not going to tell you the permissive reading is safe while the question is open in front of the agency that would decide it. Treat 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. local as the baseline, and treat anything looser as a decision your counsel makes rather than one your texting platform makes for you.
Every window below assumes daylight saving time and is expressed in Eastern, because a send window is a single span of wall-clock time and it has to be quoted against one clock to mean anything. The window opens when the westernmost recipient reaches 8 a.m. and closes when the easternmost recipient reaches 9 p.m.
| List reaches | Window, Eastern | Hours |
|---|---|---|
| One zone only | 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. local | 13 |
| Eastern and Central | 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. | 12 |
| Eastern, Central, Mountain | 10:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. | 11 |
| Contiguous United States | 11:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. | 10 |
| Contiguous plus Alaska | 12:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. | 9 |
| All fifty states | 2:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. | 7 |
The last row is the one that surprises people. A genuinely national list has a seven-hour simultaneous send window, and it does not open until the afternoon on the east coast. If that is unworkable, the answer is not to send anyway: it is to split the send by zone so each segment goes out at a sensible local hour, which is what scheduling by recipient time zone is for.
Several states contain two time zones. Florida, Kentucky, Indiana, Tennessee, Kansas, Nebraska, Texas, North Dakota, South Dakota, Oregon and Idaho all split, and sources disagree on the exact count because it depends on how you treat small slivers and daylight saving. The count does not matter. What matters is that two contacts with the same state on file can be an hour apart, so a send scheduled against the state is scheduled against the wrong thing.
The rule is written against the called party's location. The closest practical proxy most lists have is the area code, and the reliable answer is an explicit time zone on the contact record, set when you collect the number rather than inferred later.
Arizona and Hawaii do not observe daylight saving time. For most of the year Arizona keeps Mountain standard time while the rest of the Mountain zone springs forward, which puts Arizona on the same clock as the Pacific zone from March to November and back with Mountain for the winter. Hawaii sits five hours behind Eastern in winter and six behind in summer.
The practical consequence is that a send window calculated in July is wrong in December. A list spanning all fifty states has a seven-hour window under daylight saving and an eight-hour window under standard time. Any schedule you set once and forget will drift twice a year.
Quiet hours on the send path
Quiet-hours enforcement runs per recipient rather than per campaign, so a list spanning four zones sends in four waves without you building four campaigns. Start with 100 free SMS and no credit card.
Theirs. The rule says local time at the called party's location. Scheduling a 9 a.m. send from an Eastern office reaches a Pacific recipient at 6 a.m., which is inside quiet hours no matter what your own clock said when you pressed send.
Possibly, and that is not the same as yes. The exclusion for prior express invitation or permission is real and it is exactly what the Ecommerce Innovation Alliance asked the FCC to confirm, but the FCC has not answered and courts have gone both ways. Operate on the 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. baseline unless your counsel tells you otherwise in writing.
Quiet hours attach to a telephone solicitation, which is defined around encouraging a purchase. A pure appointment reminder or a delivery notification is not a solicitation. The trap is the message that starts transactional and ends with an offer, because a marketing line at the bottom can pull the whole message back into the definition.
Some are, and this page does not list them. State telemarketing statutes vary, they are amended often, and a stale table on a compliance page is worse than no table. Check the states you actually text, and treat the federal window as a floor rather than a ceiling.
No. It is the arithmetic, the rule text, and an honest account of what is still open. The compliance decision is yours and your counsel's.
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