Quiet hours
The hours a sales team does not call or text customers, set by federal and state rules and often narrowed further by the team’s own policy.
Use this definition in team training or when clarifying a sales note.
Definition
Quiet hours are the times a team keeps sales calls and texts off customers’ phones. Federal rules set the outer limit: no telephone solicitation before 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m. in the called person’s local time, under both the FCC’s TCPA rules (47 CFR 64.1200(c)(1)) and the FTC’s Telemarketing Sales Rule (16 CFR 310.4(c)).
Some states are stricter: Florida limits commercial telephone solicitation calls to 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. in the called person’s time zone, and to three in 24 hours on the same subject (Fla. Stat. 501.616). The clock that counts is the customer’s, not the team’s, so a team calling across time zones needs each contact’s location. Many teams apply the same window to texts, pause automated sequences on holidays, and treat a customer’s message at 10 p.m. as a question to answer in the morning. This is general information, not legal advice.
Why it matters
A call or text at the wrong hour is the kind of mistake customers remember and regulators count. It usually comes from automation rather than people: a sequence that fires on the sender’s clock, a list with no time zones, a retry that lands after dark. Set the window once, in the customer’s time zone, and make every tool that calls or texts read it.