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TCPA quiet hours: federal, state, and tenant gates as one stack

A US voice send can be held by up to three different dialing-window gates. Each lives on its own page in these docs — federal on TCPA federal voice guard, state overlays on US state calling windows, and your own gate on Quiet hours configuration. This page is the map between them: read it once to understand the model, then follow the links to the page that owns the layer you’re working. If you are debugging a blocked call, jump to the two troubleshooting pages linked at the bottom — they work the errors; this page frames the system.

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The three-layer model

Layer 1 — the federal TCPA window (platform-owned). US federal law, 47 U.S.C. § 227(b)(1)(B), permits outbound calls to US recipients only from 8:00 AM to 9:00 PM in the recipient’s local time. Campaign and dialer voice sends to +1 recipients are checked against that window at send time, fail closed when the recipient’s timezone can’t be resolved, and cannot be relaxed by any tenant setting. This is the only dialing-window control the platform owns outright — every other gate on the platform is tenant-owned and default-open. The statutory exposure (500–500–1,500 per call) is why the asymmetry exists: the penalty is not yours to waive, so the control is not yours to disable. Full treatment on TCPA federal voice guard. Layer 2 — state mini-TCPA overlays (statutory, tenant-relevant). Seven states (Florida, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, West Virginia) carry statutes with stricter hours or day-of-week bans than the federal window. Federal law expressly permits stricter state rules, so the binding posture for a recipient in one of those states is the intersection — the most restrictive of the federal window and the state overlay. Overlays can tighten past the federal window (Florida ends at 8 PM; Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, and West Virginia ban Sunday dialing outright) but never widen it. The full per-state table, the area-code resolution chain, and the citation trail live on US state calling windows. Layer 3 — your per-channel quiet-hours gate (tenant-owned, opt-in). Each channel has a quiet_hours.<channel>.enabled toggle in your organization settings, default off. Until you enable a channel, outside-window sends on that channel dispatch and the decision is only logged — advisory, never a hold. Once enabled, the gate hard-holds outside your window with 422 QUIET_HOURS_BLOCKED (voice: TCPA_DIALING_WINDOW_BLOCKED). Your gate can only ever add restrictions on top of the layers below it: it can narrow the envelope (9 AM–8 PM instead of 8 AM–9 PM) but never widen it, and disabling it changes nothing for the federal hard block. The configuration walkthrough is Quiet hours configuration.

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Precedence — which gate fires

The three layers compose most-restrictive-wins. A send clears only when it passes every layer that applies to it: Reading the table: on campaign and dialer voice the federal layer is a hard block no matter what your tenant settings say. On ad-hoc 1:1 voice the federal evaluation still runs, but the outcome is advisory until you turn your own voice gate on. Your gate always evaluates on top of the federal and state layers — never instead of them. When several layers disagree, the error code names the winner: TCPA_FEDERAL_DIALING_WINDOW_BLOCKED is the platform’s hard guard, TCPA_DIALING_WINDOW_BLOCKED is your own gate, and a citation in the error details means a state statute outranked both. The two troubleshooting pages below decode the full matrix.

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SMS vs voice — the federal window is voice-only

The federal TCPA window applies to telephone calls: the statute, 47 U.S.C. § 227(b)(1)(B), and its implementing rule, 47 CFR § 64.1200(c)(1), both name calls, not messages. SMS (and MMS, RCS, and the rest of the messaging channels) has no federal time window in Orbit. That has one concrete consequence: the only quiet-hours control that can hold an SMS send is your own tenant gate — and only if you enabled the sms channel. With the gate off, SMS marketing sends dispatch at any hour. Counsel often expects a federal SMS window by analogy with voice; the distinction matters, so state it explicitly in your posture review: federal window = voice-only; SMS timing = your tenant gate or nothing. The platform’s posture FAQ answers gate precedence in the same voice.

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Flipping the tenant voice gate

For ad-hoc 1:1 voice, one setting changes the posture: Campaign and dialer voice is hard-blocked outside the federal window regardless of this toggle — flipping it only governs the ad-hoc path. The wire-up (PUT /api/v1/settings/general, dashboard Settings → Voice) is walked in Quiet hours configuration.

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Where each layer lives in these docs

This page is a router, not a fourth content page: nothing above repeats the per-state table, the configuration walkthrough, or the error diagnostics. It exists so the three-layer system is visible as one system — the deep pages each own one layer on purpose, and staying a router is what keeps them authoritative.

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See also