Skip to main content

​
TCPA quiet-hours window checker

The TCPA quiet-hours checker is a free, no-sign-up page on the developer tools hub that answers one question: does right now fall inside the federal TCPA telemarketing window — 8:00 AM to 9:00 PM recipient-local time — for a chosen US timezone? Pick a timezone, and the page tells you allowed or blocked, plus a live reference table of all seven US clock zones at once.

​
What the checker answers

For the timezone you select, the page returns one of two verdicts:
  • Inside the safe-to-send window — the recipient-local time is between 8:00 AM (inclusive) and 9:00 PM (exclusive), so the federal TCPA window is open.
  • Outside the safe-to-send window — the recipient-local time is before 8:00 AM or at/after 9:00 PM, and a real outbound send to a US recipient in that timezone would be refused.
The page resolves the recipient-local hour through the browser’s Intl API, which applies real IANA timezone rules — including DST transitions like the spring/fall crossover handled at Quiet hours and DST crossover. Windows and verdicts here are the same 8:00 AM–9:00 PM federal baseline the server-side send gate enforces; the tool never quotes a different number from the one a real send gets.

​
How recipient-local time is resolved

Production sends don’t take a manually-picked timezone — they resolve the recipient clock from the number itself. The resolution order, documented in full on the quiet-hours configuration guide, is:
  1. Explicit timezone_override on the recipient record, when set.
  2. US area code → IANA timezone, looked up from the NANP area-code table for +1 numbers.
  3. Country-prefix timezone map for non-NANP numbers.
  4. UTC fallback when neither hint resolves.
The same resolution serves the quiet-hours preview endpoint, which returns a structured decision snapshot — recipient-local time, the resolved timezone, the verdict, and a next_allowed_at UTC timestamp you can schedule against. The free checker page does Step 2’s job by hand: it assumes you already know the recipient’s clock zone and asks you to pick it.

​
Tenant gate vs. federal guard

The federal window is separate from the quiet-hours window you configure on your account. Every other sending gate — quiet hours, opt-out suppression, frequency caps, DNC scrub — is a control you own, turn on, and turn off. The federal TCPA dialing window is the platform’s sole hard guard: 47 U.S.C. § 227(b)(1)(B) statically caps US telemarketing to 8:00 AM–9:00 PM recipient-local time, the statutory exposure of 500–500–1,500 per call lands on whatever platform carried it, and the control therefore cannot be widened from your account. The TCPA federal voice guard page has the full rationale.
The checker’s verdict is the federal baseline only. Your own quiet-hours configuration may be stricter, and several US states impose narrower telemarketing windows — neither is derivable from a timezone alone, so the page says so plainly rather than overclaim.

​
When a send is outside the window

A red verdict means don’t send now. The right move is to schedule the send for the UTC timestamp the platform returns, not to poll:
  1. Call the quiet-hours preview endpoint with the recipient’s number and read next_allowed_at from the response.
  2. Schedule the send at exactly that UTC instant (for example through message scheduling).
The endpoint is a no-side-effects dry check, so you can call it as often as the batch planning loop needs. If a scheduled send still comes back blocked on a state-level window — Florida and similar states run narrower mini-TCPA windows than the federal baseline — see Troubleshooting: state mini-TCPA window-blocked calls for the exact blocked-code and the region-to-each-state-window map.

​
See also