Pennsylvania Telemarketing Law 2026: Insurance Agent Guide

Starting October 18, 2026, a Pennsylvania insurance agency loses two hours of legal calling time every weekday and all of Sunday. Governor Josh Shapiro signed Senate Bill 992 into law on July 20, 2026, and it became Act No. 47 of 2026. The act narrows the state’s telemarketing calling window from 8 a.m.-9 p.m. to 9 a.m.-7 p.m., bans solicitation calls on Sundays and legal holidays outright, and writes a written-consent standard into state law that now explicitly covers text messages and ringless voicemail, not just live and automated calls. None of that is theoretical. It is the enacted text of a bill that already passed both chambers unanimously and is sitting on a 90-day countdown to enforcement.

If your agency calls Pennsylvania leads, whether they are ACA, Medicare, life, or P&C prospects, this changes the math on when a call can legally go out and what has to be on file before it does. This piece walks through exactly what changed, what stayed the same, what a licensed agent is and is not exempt from, and how to get a calling operation ready before the countdown runs out.

What Pennsylvania’s Act 47 of 2026 actually changes

Act 47 of 2026 amends the Telemarketer Registration Act, a Pennsylvania statute that has governed telemarketing in the state since December 1996, and it changes four things that matter to an insurance agency: the calling-hour window, the definition of what counts as a regulated “telephone solicitation,” the written-consent standard, and the list of prohibited practices. The enacted bill text, on file with the Pennsylvania General Assembly as Printer’s Number 1649, shows every change against the prior statutory language, which is the clearest way to see exactly what moved.

The calling-hour change is the one every agency will feel first. The prior rule barred solicitation calls “after 9 p.m. or before 8 a.m.” The amended rule bars a telephone solicitation “on a Sunday or after 7 p.m. or before 9 a.m.” That is a two-hour reduction on the evening end, a one-hour reduction on the morning end, and an entirely new blanket restriction covering every Sunday of the year, a day the prior law did not touch at all.

The second change is the definition of “telephone solicitation” itself. The prior statute defined the regulated act narrowly as a call. The amended act defines it as “a telephone call, voicemail, ringless voicemail or text message made to a residential, business or wireless telephone subscriber for the purpose of soliciting the sale of any consumer goods or services.” That single definitional change pulls SMS drip campaigns and ringless voicemail blasts, both common tools in insurance lead follow-up, fully inside the same calling-hour window, the same do-not-call list obligation, and the same consent requirement that already governed live calls.

The third change writes an actual written-consent definition into Pennsylvania law for the first time. The new “prior express written consent” language requires a signed agreement, electronic signatures included, that names the phone number, discloses that the person is agreeing to receive solicitations, and states plainly that consent is not a condition of any purchase. Anyone who has looked at a TCPA-compliant consent checkbox before will recognize the shape immediately, because it borrows the federal standard almost directly rather than inventing a separate state test.

Why this is happening: the mechanism behind the new rule

A state legislature amending a telemarketing statute is not unusual on its own. What makes this one worth an insurance agency’s attention is the specific gap it closes and the specific group most exposed to that gap: businesses running high call and text volume through platforms that did not exist, or were not common, when the underlying 1996 act was written.

Start with the term that does the most work in this statute: telemarketer. The amended act defines it as “any person or business which, in connection with telemarketing, initiates or receives telephone calls or messages to or from a residential, business or wireless telephone subscriber in this Commonwealth.” That definition is broad by design. It does not require a call center, a dialer, or a formal telemarketing department. An insurance agency that calls or texts a Pennsylvania consumer to sell a policy meets the definition on its face.

The next term worth defining precisely is prior express written consent, because Pennsylvania’s new version tracks the federal TCPA standard closely enough that an agency already TCPA-compliant is most of the way to Pennsylvania-compliant, but not all the way. Under both standards, the agreement has to be in writing (electronic signatures count), has to name the specific phone number the consumer is authorizing, has to disclose plainly what the person is agreeing to receive, and has to state that giving consent is not a condition of buying anything. The difference is scope: Pennsylvania’s version sits inside a state statute enforced by the state Attorney General, on top of, not instead of, the federal TCPA enforced by the FCC and through private lawsuits.

This distinction is the single most common thing agencies are likely to get wrong once the law takes effect. It is entirely reasonable for an agency to read “insurance producers are exempt” somewhere, confirm they are licensed, and conclude the whole statute does not apply to them. The actual statutory structure does not support that conclusion. Registration is one requirement inside a longer act. The calling-hour window, the consent standard, and the do-not-call list obligation are separate requirements that apply to anyone initiating a telephone solicitation to a Pennsylvania subscriber, licensed or not.

The timeline: from introduction to enforcement

The bill passed with broad, functionally unanimous support in both chambers, which matters for one practical reason: this is not a contested rule likely to get walked back or litigated into limbo the way some federal telemarketing rules have been in the last few years. An agency planning around January 31, 2027 for the still-pending federal TCPA revoke-all provision is watching one clock. This is a separate, state-level clock, already locked in, arriving more than three months earlier.

What it costs to get this wrong

Two separate exposure lines stack here, and they do not cancel each other out. The Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General’s own published guidance states plainly that “a violation of the law carries a civil penalty of up to $1,000, or $3,000 if the person contacted is age 60 or older.” This amendment did not touch that penalty section. Separately, if the call in question was automated or used a prerecorded or artificial voice without valid consent, the federal TCPA’s private right of action under 47 U.S.C. § 227(b)(3) allows a consumer to recover $500 to $1,500 per violation, and TCPA litigation is not a shrinking category: WebRecon’s own year-end tracking counted 2,810 TCPA lawsuits filed in federal court across all of 2025, essentially flat versus 2024 but far from the historical lull some agencies assume the category is in.

Run the arithmetic on a single mistake. An agent working a Pennsylvania Medicare Advantage lead list on a Sunday afternoon, believing the old 8 a.m.-9 p.m. rule still applies after October 18, 2026, places calls that are simultaneously a Pennsylvania civil violation and, if any of those calls used automated dialing without documented consent, a separate TCPA exposure. One afternoon of calling the wrong day, at scale, is not a hypothetical worth ignoring for the cost of updating a dialer’s schedule.

How to get ready before October 18, 2026

None of the following requires buying anything. An agency can run every step below with a CRM it already owns and staff it already employs.

1. Reset your calling-hours configuration now, not on October 18. If your dialer, CRM campaign, or manual calling script is set to the old 8 a.m.-9 p.m. window, change it to 9 a.m.-7 p.m. for any Pennsylvania-area codes and ZIP codes, and add a hard Sunday and legal-holiday block. Test it before the effective date so a scheduling error does not surface as a live violation.
2. Audit whether your text and ringless voicemail campaigns are on the same schedule as your calls. Because the amended definition folds text messages and ringless voicemail into “telephone solicitation,” any automation that fires SMS drips or voicemail drops on a separate schedule from your live-call campaigns needs to move onto the same 9 a.m.-7 p.m., no-Sunday, no-holiday rule.
3. Pull your current consent language and check it against the four required elements. The new state standard requires the agreement to name the phone number, disclose what the person is agreeing to receive, state that consent is not a purchase condition, and carry a signature, electronic signatures included. HighLevel’s own consent checkbox documentation shows the mechanics of capturing and timestamping this kind of consent, though the platform is explicit that enabling a checkbox is a tool for recording consent, not a guarantee of legal compliance on its own.
4. Confirm your registration status, and document your reasoning either way. If your agency is relying on the licensed-business exemption in Section 3(b.1)(5), write down why: the specific Pennsylvania insurance license held, and that your calling activity stays within the scope of that licensed business. If you are not confident the exemption applies to your structure, registering with the Office of Attorney General is the safer default.
5. Scrub against Pennsylvania’s own do-not-call list, separately from the national registry. Pennsylvania maintains its own do-not-call list through a designated list administrator, distinct from the FTC’s National Do Not Call Registry, and telemarketers are required to obtain and apply updated listings on a quarterly cycle. Calling a number that is clean on the national list does not confirm it is clean on Pennsylvania’s.
6. Train whoever answers or places the call on the new opt-out keyword set. The amended act requires recognizing STOP, QUIT, END, REVOKE, OPT OUT, CANCEL, and UNSUBSCRIBE as valid opt-out language for text messages, and requires a live opt-out mechanism within two seconds of a robocall’s opening disclosure. A team that only recognizes “STOP” as valid will miss some of these.

If you want to build a version of the automated setup above yourself, with your own dialer and a documented consent process, plenty of agencies do exactly that, and it is worth pricing against buying it as a managed service before deciding either way.

Where TheAffordableAI fits

Getting the consent language right and confirming your registration status are decisions a licensed agent, ideally with counsel, has to make. Where a managed AI caller helps is in what happens once those decisions are made: TheAffordableAI’s calling schedule can be configured to the exact legal window for a given state, so a Pennsylvania campaign simply cannot fire a call before 9 a.m., after 7 p.m., or on a Sunday, because the system enforces it rather than relying on a person to remember a date that changed. Every call, text, and disposition logs to the lead’s record automatically and syncs natively with HighLevel, which is the documentation trail a Pennsylvania Attorney General inquiry or a TCPA dispute would ask an agency to produce. The full feature list is on the features page.

Pricing is published, not quoted privately: a Single Account runs $200 a month plus a $500 one-time setup fee, at $0.20 a minute, down to $0.15 a minute at bulk volume. An Agency plan runs $500 a month plus a $1,000 one-time setup fee, at $0.18 a minute, down to $0.16 a minute at bulk. Both are month to month with no long-term contract, so testing whether a managed caller solves the scheduling problem costs, at most, one month either way. The math above uses TheAffordableAI’s own published rate; run it against your own call volume and average call length on the pricing page.

When this is a scheduling problem, not a calling-platform problem

It would be dishonest to sell a new calling platform as the fix for a compliance gap that is really a documentation and training gap. If your agency runs a small, disciplined Pennsylvania book with a handful of agents who already track calling hours carefully, the honest fix might be nothing more than updating a shared calendar reminder and retraining on the new opt-out keywords, not adopting new software. The place a calling platform earns its cost is volume: an agency dialing hundreds of Pennsylvania leads a week across multiple agents and channels is exactly where a manually enforced calling window starts to fail quietly, one missed cutoff at a time, long before anyone notices the pattern.

Pennsylvania’s new telemarketing law is not a distant proposal. It is signed, dated, and counting down to October 18, 2026, with a calling window that is narrower than the federal floor most agencies have been building around for years. The agencies most exposed are the ones running real volume into Pennsylvania across calls, texts, and voicemail drops on schedules that were never built to account for a state-specific window at all. Whether the fix is a calendar update or a new calling platform depends entirely on how much of that volume your agency actually runs, and that is worth answering honestly before October 18, not after.