The FCC One-to-One Consent Rule and Insurance Leads
The FCC's one-to-one consent rule for telemarketing leads never took effect and was formally repealed. Here's the consent standard that actually applies to purchased insurance leads today, and how to document it.
No. The FCC's one-to-one consent rule for telemarketing calls and texts never took effect — it was vacated by a federal appeals court in January 2025, and the FCC formally removed it from its own regulations in August 2025. If you buy insurance leads, the consent standard that applies to those leads right now is the one that existed before 2023: a single opt-in can still cover more than one company, as long as it names them and discloses it clearly. That does not make lead vetting optional, and it does not make a weak consent record safe. What the one-to-one consent rule would have required In December 2023, the FCC adopted a rule meant to close what it called the "lead generator robocall loophole." Under the proposal, a consumer's prior express written consent to receive autodialed or prerecorded marketing calls and texts would apply to one seller at a time. A comparison-shopping site that collected one signature and then routed that consumer to dozens of insurance agents, lenders, or marketers would no longer be allowed to treat that one signature as valid consent for all of them. Each seller would need its own named, disclosed, "logically and topically related" consent. The rule was scheduled to take effect on January 27, 2025, and the FCC's own consumer guide at the time laid out exactly what it would have changed for comparison-shopping and lead-generation sites. Why it never actually took effect The Insurance Marketing Coalition challenged the rule before it could take effect, and the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on January 24, 2025 — three days before the rule was set to begin — that the FCC had exceeded its statutory authority. The court found that "prior express written consent" under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act does not mean one-to-one consent, and it vacated the FCC's 2023 order on that point. The rule was never in force for a single day. The FCC did not appeal. Instead, it went back and formally rewrote its own rule text to match the court's ruling. That Federal Register notice confirms the court's mandate vacating the one-to-one language took effect April 30, 2025, and the FCC's conforming rule change became effective August 29, 2025. The current, live regulatory text — the version an agent or compliance officer should actually be checking — is at 47 CFR § 64.1200 , and it does not contain a one-to-one consent requirement. So what consent standard applies to insurance leads today The baseline Telephone Consumer Protection Act rule is back to what it was before 2023: a consumer can give one written consent that covers more than one named company, as long as the disclosure is clear about who will be contacting them. That consent still has to be: Obtained before an autodialed call, a prerecorded or artificial-voice message, or an automated text is sent In writing, with the consumer's signature (electronic signatures count) Clear about who may call or text, not buried in dense terms-of-service language Honored the moment the consumer revokes it, in whatever reasonable way they revoke it The FCC's consumer guide to robocalls and texts describes the baseline requirement in plain language, and it is the standard a lead vendor's consent language needs to meet right now — not the one-to-one standard that never came into force. Why "it's legal again" is not the same as "stop worrying about it" Three things make this a bad time to relax: State mini-TCPA laws did not move. Florida's Telephone Solicitation Act, Oklahoma's and Washington's telemarketing statutes, and similar state laws impose their own consent and calling-hour rules independent of whatever the FCC does, and several of them are stricter than the federal baseline. TCPA class-action exposure did not go away. The rule that was vacated was a proposed tightening of the standard — not the underlying law. Plaintiffs' firms still bring suits over vague or missing consent, and statutory damages run $500–$1,500 per call or text — on top of whatever you already spent buying the lead in the first place . The vacated rule could come back in a narrower form. The Eleventh Circuit ruled on the FCC's authority to redefine "prior express written consent," not on whether one-to-one consent is good policy. A future FCC could propose a narrower version that survives a legal challenge. An agency that bought leads assuming one-to-one consent was mandatory, and then treats the vacatur as a reason to stop checking vendor consent language altogether, has swung from one mistake to the opposite one. The actual job — proving that a specific contact gave specific, written consent to be contacted by your agency — has not changed at all. A consent checklist for agencies buying insurance leads Get the actual consent language in writing from every lead vendor — not a vendor's summary of it, the disclosure text the consumer actually saw and the list of sellers it named, if any. Confirm your agency's name or a clear description of your agency appeared on that disclosure if the consent covers multiple sellers. A disclosure that names "insurance partners" generically is far weaker evidence than one that names your agency specifically. Keep a timestamped copy of the consent record for every purchased lead , tied to the phone number and the date it was captured, for as long as that contact stays in your pipeline and for your state's relevant statute of limitations after that. Check calling hours before the first dial. The baseline TCPA still restricts autodialed and prerecorded outreach to 8 a.m.–9 p.m. in the consumer's time zone, regardless of consent. Scrub every new lead against the national Do Not Call list and your own internal suppression list before the first contact attempt, not after. Honor a revocation the moment it happens — a reply of "STOP," "unsubscribe," or a verbal request on a call — and stop all future automated contact to that number. An agency that is already running a structured follow-up sequence for new leads needs this suppression to apply to every step of that sequence, not just the first text. Re-check vendor consent language periodically. A vendor's disclosure that was compliant last year can quietly drift, especially if the vendor changes its own partner list. Documenting consent in your own CRM, not just trusting the vendor's None of the checklist above works if your own systems can't enforce it once a lead becomes a contact. This is where the record-keeping burden actually lands on your agency, not the lead vendor, because the vendor's consent record is only as good as what you do with it afterward — one more reason the texting tool you dial and text leads from needs to be the same system that tracks their consent, not a separate one. AgencyView's bulk texting campaigns check a contact's opt-out status before every send, not just at the start of a campaign — the same suppression list a client's "STOP" reply writes to is the list every later send reads from, so a revoked contact stays suppressed across every future campaign, not just the one they replied to. A reply of "STOP" is caught and recorded automatically, and campaigns can be configured to skip anyone already marked do-not-disturb, append a standard opt-out line to every message, and respect a send window and days-of-week schedule so outreach never lands outside compliant calling hours. Every opt-in and opt-out event shows up on the contact's own history timeline — "Opted out of text messages" or "Text message do-not-disturb removed" — so an agent or a compliance review can see exactly when consent status changed and why, without digging through a vendor's separate records. The same discipline is built into AgencyView's cold-outreach call scripts: the TCPA reminder baked into the script library tells the agent to call only between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m. in the consumer's time zone, to scrub the number against the Do Not Call list and the agency's own internal list first, and to keep a written consent record on file for…
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