Four.
That is how many rules stand between a legal cold call and an illegal one, for an agent dialing expireds, FSBOs or a farm in the United States. Cold calling itself is legal. It always has been. Nothing in federal law forbids a licensed agent from picking up a phone and calling a homeowner who has never heard of them. What the law regulates is which numbers, at what hours, by what means, and what happens after the homeowner says stop, and each of those has a rule with a number in it. Know the four numbers and you can answer the question for any dial you are about to make. This is operational education, not legal advice; the rules below are federal, your state adds its own, and a compliance attorney is the right person to sign off on your specific setup.
Rule one: the registry, and the 31 days
You may not call a number on the National Do-Not-Call Registry to solicit a listing. The prohibition sits in the FTC’s Telemarketing Sales Rule at 16 CFR 310.4(b)(1)(iii)(B) and again in the FCC’s rules at 47 CFR 64.1200(c)(2), and it applies to a real estate agent selling listing services exactly as it applies to anyone else selling anything.
The number is 31. Your copy of the registry must be no more than 31 days old on the day of the call, which in practice means scrubbing every list at least monthly and every fresh list before its first dial. Access is free for up to five area codes and, since October 2025, $82 per area code beyond that. The registry may be used only to avoid calls; using it to build a list is itself a violation. Scrub monthly, at minimum.
Two exceptions exist and neither is the one agents hope for. A number may be called if the homeowner gave you express written permission, or if you have an established business relationship with them, meaning a transaction in the last eighteen months or an inquiry in the last three, with your company. An expired seller’s relationship was with their prior brokerage, and it does not transfer. A FSBO’s phone number in an ad is an invitation to buyers; NAR’s telemarketing guidance is explicit that it does not open the door to listing solicitations. If the number is registered and neither exception is yours, the call is off, whatever the seller signal.
Rule two: the clock, 8 a.m. to 9 p.m.
Both rulebooks set the same window: no solicitation call before 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m. in the called party’s local time, at 16 CFR 310.4(c) and 47 CFR 64.1200(c)(1). Local time means the homeowner’s, which matters for a farm that straddles a time zone line and matters more for a cell number whose area code says nothing about where the phone is tonight.
States narrow it. Florida, to take the most cited example, limits commercial solicitation calls to 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. and caps calls at three in any 24-hour period on the same subject from the same number, with a private right of action carrying $500 per violation and the possibility of treble damages. Several other states run narrower windows, Sunday restrictions or holiday bans of their own. The federal window is the ceiling. Your state sets the actual hours. The compliance guide tracks the calling windows for all fifty states and the District.
Rule three: the cell phone, and what may not touch it
This is the rule most agents have never read, and it is the one with the largest exposure, because nearly every number you will dial is a mobile. The CDC’s wireless survey put 78.7 percent of adults in wireless-only households in the second half of 2024 (NCHS). Plan every list as a cell list.
The Telephone Consumer Protection Act, at 47 U.S.C. 227(b)(1)(A)(iii), prohibits calls to a cellular number made with an automatic telephone dialing system or using an artificial or prerecorded voice without the called party’s prior express consent. A homeowner on a cold list has given no consent of any kind. That means no prerecorded message, no artificial voice, and no voicemail drop to a cold cell number; the FCC has treated ringless voicemail as a call under the statute. A human being, dialing a number and speaking when someone answers, is the mode the rule was written to permit.
What counts as an automatic telephone dialing system is a question the courts have moved on more than once, and it is the question to bring to your attorney about whatever dialing software you use. The parts that have not moved are the prerecorded and artificial voice prohibitions. Separately, if your dialer places calls in a mode that can connect a live homeowner to nobody, the abandonment rules at 16 CFR 310.4(b)(4) apply: the call is abandoned if no agent is on the line within two seconds of the greeting, no more than three percent of answered calls per campaign per thirty days may be abandoned, and every dial must ring at least fifteen seconds or four rings. The dialer modes piece covers where those rules bite.
Rule four: the request, and the five years
When a homeowner asks you not to call again, 47 CFR 64.1200(d) requires that the request be recorded, placed on your internal do-not-call list, and honored, and that it stay honored for five years. The request binds you and your company across every list and campaign. There is no reset when the expired list refreshes or the farm cycle comes around again. The objections piece treats this as an instruction rather than an objection, because that is what it is.
The same paragraph requires that you identify yourself. On every solicitation call you must give your name, the name of the company on whose behalf you are calling, and a telephone number or address at which that company can be reached. The TSR adds, at 310.4(d), that you must promptly disclose that the purpose of the call is to sell something and what that something is. An opener that hides who you are or why you are calling fails this rule before the homeowner says a word.
| Rule | Where it lives | The number | What it means before the dial |
|---|---|---|---|
| The registry | 16 CFR 310.4(b)(1)(iii)(B); 47 CFR 64.1200(c)(2) | 31 days | Scrubbed this month, and no exception you are borrowing from someone else’s relationship |
| The clock | 16 CFR 310.4(c); 47 CFR 64.1200(c)(1) | 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. local, narrower by state | The homeowner’s clock, not yours |
| The cell phone | 47 U.S.C. 227(b)(1)(A)(iii) | Zero prerecorded or artificial voice without consent | A person dials, a person speaks, no voicemail drops |
| The request | 47 CFR 64.1200(d) | 5 years | Recorded before the next dial, honored everywhere |
The myths, in the words agents use
“They put their number on the sign, so they want calls.” They want buyers. The registry still applies, and so do the other three rules.
“Expireds are fair game because they were just on the market.” Their relationship was with another broker. Nothing about a failed listing creates an exception for you.
“The number came from public records, so it’s exempt.” Where the number came from has no bearing on any of the four rules. The phone sourcing piece explains that the number did not come from public records anyway.
“I’m a small business, not a call center.” The rules have no size threshold. A solo agent dialing forty numbers from a kitchen table is a telemarketer under both the TSR and the TCPA.
“My data vendor scrubbed it.” The safe harbor for an accidental call to a registered number belongs to the caller who maintains written procedures, trains staff, keeps an internal list and pulls the registry within 31 days. A vendor’s scrub, dated whenever it was dated, does none of that for you.
“I only leave voicemails, I don’t talk to anyone.” A prerecorded or artificial-voice message to a cold cell is the clearest violation on this page. A voicemail you leave in your own voice after a live dial is a different matter, but the drop products are not.
What a violation costs
The Telephone Consumer Protection Act gives the homeowner a private right of action: $500 per call, trebled to $1,500 if the violation was willful or knowing, for autodialer and prerecorded-voice violations, and for do-not-call violations once the household has received more than one offending call in twelve months. Those suits are brought as class actions routinely, and the per-call math is what makes them expensive.
On the federal enforcement side, the FTC’s maximum civil penalty for a Telemarketing Sales Rule violation was adjusted for inflation to $53,088 per violation in 2025. States add their own penalties and, in Florida and several others, their own private rights of action. And for a Realtor, the Code of Ethics sits on top of all of it: Article 16 bars soliciting a home that is exclusively listed with another broker regardless of what the telephone rules allow.
The four questions before every dial
Is this number clear of the registry as of a pull within the last 31 days, and clear of my internal list? Is it between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m. where the homeowner is, and inside my state’s window if that is narrower? Am I, a person, going to speak when this answers, with no recording and no voicemail drop? And when this call ends, will whatever the homeowner tells me about future calls be on the record before I make the next one?
Four yeses and the call is legal. Any no and it is not. The list does not matter. The scripts and the list allocation on this site all assume those four yeses, and the compliance guide is where the state-by-state detail lives.