Florida Telephone Solicitation Act: Agent Guide 2026

If you sell insurance to Florida consumers, the state’s Telephone Solicitation Act does not exempt you, and that is easy to get backward because a different Florida statute does. Section 501.059, the Florida Telephone Solicitation Act (FTSA), lists no carve-out for licensed insurance brokers, agents, customer representatives, or solicitors anywhere in its text. The older Florida Telemarketing Act, at Section 501.604(8), does exempt licensed insurance producers, but only from that statute’s registration and bonding requirement, a completely different obligation. An agent who reads “insurance agents are exempt in Florida” somewhere and stops there is reading about the wrong law.

That mix-up matters because the FTSA is one of the more aggressively litigated state telemarketing statutes in the country, and it carries a private right of action, meaning a consumer, not just a regulator, can sue directly. This guide walks through what the statute actually regulates, what changed the last time the Legislature touched it, what two bills tried and failed to change in 2026, what a violation costs in real dollars, and how to build a Florida calling program that survives contact with all of it.

Picture the ordinary version of this. Your agency buys a batch of Florida ACA or Medicare Advantage leads, the vendor’s onboarding page says the leads are “TCPA compliant,” and your dialer starts an eight-touch cadence the same way it does for every other state on your list. Nothing about that workflow looks different from what works fine in Georgia or Pennsylvania. Three weeks later a demand letter shows up citing Section 501.059, and the vendor’s compliance promise turns out to have covered federal consent, not Florida’s separate statute. That gap, between what a vendor calls “compliant” and what Florida’s own law actually requires, is where most of this exposure comes from.

What Florida’s Telephone Solicitation Act Actually Covers

The FTSA regulates any “telephonic sales call,” a term the statute defines to include a phone call, a text message, or a voicemail transmission made to solicit a sale of goods or services. It does not just cover live cold calls. If your agency’s dialer drops a voicemail, or your CRM fires an automated text about a plan comparison, both fall inside the same definition a ringing autodialer does.

The operative rule sits in Section 501.059(8): a person may not make, or knowingly allow to be made, an unsolicited telephonic sales call using an automated system for the selection or dialing of numbers, or an artificial or prerecorded voice, without the called party’s prior express written consent. “Prior express written consent” means a signed agreement that names the specific number the consumer authorized, states plainly that consent is not a condition of any purchase, and, since the 2023 amendment, accepts an electronic signature or an affirmative act like checking a box as a valid signature.

Section 501.059’s own exemption list, at subsection (1)(k), is four items long and specific: a call made in response to the consumer’s own express request, a call primarily about an existing debt or contract that has not yet been completed, a call to someone the solicitor already has “a prior or existing business relationship” with, and a call from a newspaper publisher or its agent. Insurance is not on it, and neither is any general “you’re a licensed professional” carve-out. That is the detail that trips up agents who have read a state telemarketing guide written with Oklahoma, Georgia, or a dozen other states in mind, most of which do carve out a licensed producer from their own consent statute the way Florida’s separate Telemarketing Act does. Florida drew that line differently, on purpose, when it added a private right of action to the FTSA in 2021.

Two things about that exemption list are worth sitting with. First, the “prior or existing business relationship” exemption has no defined time limit in the statute’s own text, unlike some other states that cap an established relationship at a fixed window, commonly 18 or 24 months. That absence cuts both ways: it means Florida’s text does not force you to stop treating a client as an existing relationship after two years the way it does elsewhere, but it also means you cannot point to a bright-line rule if a claim turns on how “existing” the relationship actually was. Second, the signature definition that HB 761 broadened lives right next to that exemption list, at subsection (1)(h), and it now recognizes “an electronic or digital signature” valid under applicable law, or “an act that demonstrates express consent, including, but not limited to, checking a box indicating consent or responding affirmatively to receiving text messages.” A checkbox on a real quote form, properly worded, clears that bar. A purchased list with no record of what the consumer actually saw and clicked does not.

The Other Florida Law Everyone Confuses With It

Florida’s Telemarketing Act, codified separately at Chapter 501, Part IV, Sections 501.601 through 501.626, is where the actual insurance exemption lives, and it is a registration statute, not a consent statute. Section 501.605 requires a “commercial telephone seller” to obtain a license from the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (FDACS) before soliciting Florida consumers by phone. Section 501.604 then lists 28 categories of callers exempt from that licensing requirement, and category (8) reads: “Any licensed insurance broker, agent, customer representative, or solicitor when soliciting within the scope of his or her license.” That exemption is real, and it means a properly licensed producer does not need a separate FDACS telemarketer license to call a Florida prospect.

What it does not do is touch Section 501.059 at all. These are two different parts of the same chapter, built for two different problems, and reading one statute’s exemption into the other is the single most common mistake I see in how agencies think about Florida. The table below lays out where each one actually applies.

Notice that three of the four rows in that table apply to a Florida insurance agent regardless of licensing status. The one exemption that does exist covers a licensing fee and a registration form, not whether you can legally dial the number in front of you.

How Florida Stacks Up Against States You May Have Already Read About

If you sell across state lines, you have probably already read a version of this guide for Oklahoma, Georgia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, or Oregon, and in most of those, the headline finding was that a licensed insurance producer gets a real carve-out from the state’s own TCPA-style consent law. Oklahoma’s Telephone Solicitation Act of 2022, for instance, exempts a licensed insurance broker or agent soliciting within scope of license from its own consent, calling-hours, and frequency-cap rules. Florida is the state in that list where the equivalent carve-out does not exist in the consent statute at all.

The lesson is not that Florida is uniquely hostile to the industry. It is that “am I exempt as a licensed agent” is a state-by-state, statute-by-statute question, and the answer you got from a different state’s guide, even one written about a different Florida-sounding law like the Telemarketing Act, does not transfer. Treat every new state on your calling list as its own research project, not an extension of the last one.

What the 2023 Amendment Changed, and What It Didn’t

CS/CS/HB 761 passed the Florida House 99 to 14 and the Senate 29 to 10, and Governor DeSantis signed it on May 25, 2023 as Chapter 2023-150. It is still the current law, and understanding what it actually did keeps you from either overestimating your protection or underestimating your exposure.

Before the amendment, the FTSA applied to a system that could select or dial numbers automatically, a broad definition that swept in software many businesses did not think of as an autodialer. HB 761 changed that “or” to “and”: the statute now applies only to a system that both selects and dials automatically. A platform where a human picks which contact to call, and the software only handles the dialing, arguably falls outside the narrower definition. A platform that pulls the next number from a queue and dials it without a human choosing that specific number does not.

The bill also fixed a practical problem with the original consent language, which some courts had read narrowly enough that even a signed application form did not clearly count as consent to be called about that application. The amended statute now explicitly accepts an electronic or digital signature, or an affirmative act like checking a consent box or replying yes to a text asking whether the consumer wants to receive texts, as a valid signature for prior express written consent.

For text-message claims specifically, HB 761 added a real precondition: a consumer generally cannot sue over an unwanted text unless they replied “STOP” and then received at least one more automated text within the next 15 days. That is meant to filter out a claim based on a single unwanted text with no follow-up, but it does not touch calls or voicemails, and it does not change anything about a caller’s own obligation to honor a stop request immediately once one comes in.

What a Violation Actually Costs

Section 501.059(10) sets the damages: a called party can recover actual damages or $500, whichever is greater, for each violation, and a court may award up to three times that amount, $1,500, if it finds the violation was willful or knowing. Section 501.059(11) lets the prevailing party recover reasonable attorney fees and costs on top of that. Those numbers are per violation, meaning per call or per text, and a follow-up cadence that would be completely ordinary in most industries turns into compounding exposure fast if consent was never properly captured in the first place.

Two 2026 Bills Died in the Same Committee Meeting

Two bills tried to move Florida’s telemarketing framework this session, and both stalled on the exact same day, which is worth knowing if you are relying on a compliance guide written before March 2026 or expecting a change that never arrived.

SB 134, filed by Senator Polsky, would have revised the FTSA’s definitions of “telephone solicitor” and “telephonic sales call,” and would have tightened when a prevailing party in a state-initiated action could recover attorney fees. It was introduced on January 13, 2026, and died in the Senate Commerce and Tourism Committee on March 13, 2026.

SB 1516, with a companion in the House as HB 1299, took a different angle entirely: caller ID, not consent. It would have required voice service providers to authenticate caller identification using the STIR/SHAKEN framework, banned transmitting misleading or inaccurate caller ID information with intent to defraud, cause harm, or wrongfully obtain something of value, and set an effective date of October 1, 2026. It cleared the Commerce and Tourism Committee 9 to 0 on February 11, 2026, a strong first showing, then died in the Regulated Industries Committee on March 13, 2026, the same day SB 134 did.

Neither becoming law means the current FTSA, as HB 761 left it in 2023, stays exactly where it is for now. It also means the caller ID authentication requirement some agencies were bracing for did not arrive this year, though the underlying federal STIR/SHAKEN framework under the FCC’s own rules already applies to voice service providers regardless of what Florida’s Legislature does with it next session.

How to Get Florida Consent Right Before You Dial

None of this requires a law degree to manage. It requires a documented process, applied every time, before a Florida number gets an automated call or text.

If you buy third-party leads that claim Florida-compliant consent, verify it the way you would verify any other vendor claim: ask what the actual opt-in language said, when it was captured, and whether you can get a copy of the record, not just a checkbox that a vendor’s own onboarding form told them to check.

Shared leads carry the most exposure, not the least

Shared leads, the kind sold to three or four agencies at once, are where this goes wrong most often, because the consent capture happens once, upstream, at a lead form you never saw, and every buyer downstream inherits whatever that form actually said. “TCPA compliant” on a vendor’s landing page is a marketing claim, not a legal fact, and it almost never distinguishes federal consent from Florida’s separate FTSA requirement. Before you load a shared Florida list into an automated cadence, ask the vendor for the exact consent language shown to the consumer, the date range the leads were captured, and whether the disclosure named your agency or only said “insurance partners.” A vendor that cannot produce that on request is not a vendor whose compliance claim should carry your exposure.

The mistakes that actually show up in practice

A few patterns account for most of the real Florida exposure I see agencies walk into, and none of them require bad intent, just an assumption that turned out to be wrong.

• Assuming the licensing exemption covers consent too. Section 501.604(8) and Section 501.059 are different statutes with different purposes. Being properly licensed and registered does not make an automated call to a non-consenting number legal.
• Treating “existing business relationship” as automatically permanent. The FTSA sets no fixed time limit on it, but a relationship that ended years ago, with no other consent on file, is a weak position to defend a claim from.
• Skipping Florida’s own Do Not Call list. Checking the federal registry and calling it done misses a state-specific list a Florida consumer may have joined without ever touching the national one.
• Not building for the STOP precondition either way. HB 761’s 15-day rule limits when a consumer can sue over texts, but it never limits your own obligation to stop texting the moment someone asks. Building your system around the exception instead of the obligation gets the incentive backward.
• Scaling a Florida campaign before the consent record exists. Volume multiplies whatever gap is already there. A hundred calls on a shaky consent record is a hundred separate exposures, not one bigger one.

The Federal Layer Still Sits on Top of All of This

Figuring out where Florida’s own statutes land you does not settle the question. The federal TCPA, at 47 U.S.C. Section 227, requires prior express consent for an autodialed or artificial-voice call to a wireless number, written consent specifically for a marketing call, independent of anything Florida does with its own exemptions. Its own damages structure mirrors Florida’s almost exactly: actual loss or $500 per violation, tripled to $1,500 for a willful or knowing one.

The FTC’s Advisory Opinion 03-1, from 2003, addresses a related but separate question: whether the federal Telemarketing Sales Rule applies to insurance telemarketing at all, given the McCarran-Ferguson Act’s deference to state insurance regulation. The FTC’s answer there turns on whether the specific activity qualifies as “the business of insurance” under a three-part test and is itself state-regulated, not on who happens to be making the call. It is a useful piece of the federal picture, but it does not touch Florida’s own FTSA, which exists entirely outside the Telemarketing Sales Rule question.

Where TheAffordableAI Fits

Nothing above changes if you switch from a human dialer to an AI one, and I want to be direct about that instead of pretending a piece of software makes a state statute disappear. What a well-built AI calling setup can do is make the process in the checklist above actually happen every time, instead of depending on someone remembering it during a busy afternoon. The full feature list covers how each piece works together; the six that matter most for a Florida calling program are below.

Where to Start This Week

You do not need outside counsel to get the basics right, though it is worth having counsel review your actual consent language before you scale a Florida campaign. Do these three things first.

1. Pull your Florida contact list and check what consent actually exists for each number. Not what a vendor promised, what you can produce: a signature, a timestamp, and the specific number authorized.
2. Separate your two Florida obligations. Confirm you are properly licensed (or exempt under the Telemarketing Act’s Section 501.604) for registration purposes, and separately confirm every automated call or text has valid FTSA consent. They are not the same checkbox.
3. Check Florida’s own Do Not Call list through FDACS, not just the federal registry, and build a process that honors a STOP request the same day it arrives, on every channel.

Florida did not carve insurance out of its telephone solicitation law the way several other states have, and two 2026 attempts to change the surrounding rules both stalled in committee. That leaves the statute exactly where HB 761 set it in 2023: no exemption, real statutory damages, and a private right of action that does not wait for a regulator to act. Build the consent record before the first automated call goes out, not after a demand letter arrives.