Pennsylvania Just Moved Your Calling Window. Three Weeks In, Is Your Dialer Caught Up?

Pennsylvania’s rewrite of its telemarketing law has been in force since October 18, 2026, and it is the kind of change that sits quietly in a dialer config until it causes a problem. If your campaigns still treat Pennsylvania like it did in September, you are now calling outside the legal window, texting under rules that did not apply before, and possibly relying on a consent standard the state no longer accepts.

Pennsylvania’s governor signed Senate Bill 992 on July 20, 2026. The law had a 90-day compliance runway, which put the effective date at October 18. Here is what changed on the floor, based on law firm summaries of the statute.

Texts and ringless voicemail now count

The definition of a telephone solicitation now expressly covers text messages and ringless voicemail, not just live calls. If your SMS or RVM programs ran on the assumption that Pennsylvania’s telemarketing law was a voice-only problem, that assumption ended on October 18.

The calling window got shorter

The old window was 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. The new one is 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., and solicitations on Sundays are banned entirely. Holidays were already off limits. That is three hours a day cut from your schedule, plus every Sunday, for any number tied to Pennsylvania. Check your time-zone logic too: the rule follows the person you are contacting, not your call center’s location.

Robocalls need written consent

According to Kelley Drye and Mac Murray & Shuster, the law replaces the old “express request” carve-out with a prior express written consent standard that largely tracks the federal TCPA definition. Robocalls using prerecorded or artificial voice need that written consent for residential, business and wireless lines, subject to statutory exceptions. Electronic signatures count. The established-business-relationship exception survives.

The law also prohibits unfair or deceptive practices to obtain consent and bans using synthetic or computer-generated messaging to defraud, deceive or mislead. Operators running AI voice agents should have their scripts reviewed with that language in mind.

No spoofing, and the brand is on the hook

Telemarketers may not falsify their caller ID name or number. The prohibitions reach anyone who “initiates or causes to be initiated” a solicitation, which TCPAWorld reads as extending liability to the company that hired the telemarketer. If you buy outbound from a vendor, their mistakes in Pennsylvania are now more clearly yours.

Penalties remain up to $1,000 per violation, or $3,000 when the person contacted is 60 or older. The Attorney General and district attorneys can enforce. Commentators disagree on how easily consumers can sue on their own under the state’s consumer protection law, so do not plan around a quiet plaintiffs’ bar.

The state is paying attention

This is not a sleepy statute. Attorney General Dave Sunday co-led a bipartisan coalition that in July urged the FCC to toughen “Know Your Customer” obligations for voice providers, citing an estimated one billion robocalls to Pennsylvanians the year before. A state AG that engaged on carrier policy is not likely to ignore a fresh telemarketing law.

Your three-week audit

Pull Pennsylvania numbers into their own calling-window rule: 9 to 7, no Sundays, no holidays.
Apply the same window to SMS and RVM, not just voice.
Audit consent records for robocall and prerecorded campaigns against a written-consent standard.
Confirm all seven opt-out words (stop, quit, end, revoke, opt out, cancel, unsubscribe) are honored.
Get written assurances from vendors, since liability flows back to you.

State mini-TCPAs like Pennsylvania’s tend to draw the same repeat plaintiffs who work the federal statute. Scrubbing your lists through TCPALitigatorList.com before you dial flags known TCPA litigators so a Sunday text to the wrong person does not turn into a demand letter.

Pennsylvania just joined the growing list of states with their own calling rules. The operators who handle that best treat state rules as data in the dialer, not a memo in a shared drive.