The per-call math, the four-year lookback, and who actually does the suing.

TCPA Fines and Penalties: The 2026 Per-Call Math

TCPA penalties are simple and brutal: $500 per violating call or text — or actual monetary loss, whichever is greater — and up to $1,500 per call for willful or knowing conduct, under 47 U.S.C. § 227(b)(3). Damages attach per call, not per person; plaintiffs need no proof of monetary injury; courts apply a four-year statute of limitations; and enforcement comes from four directions at once. Here is the math as of July 2026.

This page is education, not legal advice. A dialer is a tool — the dialer itself can be operated lawfully, but compliance depends on how you use it. Enzo does not scrub against national or state DNC registries — use a third-party service before uploading lists. Consult a TCPA attorney for your specific situation.

What Is a TCPA Violation?

A TCPA violation is any call or text that breaks the statute or the FCC’s implementing rules in 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200. For legitimate teams, exposure clusters in six places:

• Consent failures — autodialed, artificial, prerecorded, or AI-voice telemarketing without prior express written consent (47 C.F.R. § 64.1200(a)(2)–(3); AI and cloned voices are “artificial” per FCC 24-17, February 2024).
• Do-not-call violations — solicitation calls to registry-listed numbers without an exemption such as an established business relationship.
• Quiet hours — solicitations before 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m., local time at the called party’s location; the caller bears the burden of knowing that time.
• Revocation failures — since April 11, 2025, consent can be revoked in any reasonable manner and must be honored within ten business days.
• Internal DNC failures — no written policy or training, or requests not recorded, honored within ten business days, and kept five years (47 C.F.R. § 64.1200(d)).
• Identification failures — not providing the caller’s name, the company, and a contact number or address (47 C.F.R. § 64.1200(d)(4)).

Whether a dialer working stored lead lists is an “autodialer” depends on the court, as of July 2026: under Facebook v. Duguid (2021), equipment qualifies only if it can store or produce numbers using a random or sequential number generator, and most federal courts hold dialers calling stored lead lists fall outside that — but some, the Second Circuit among them, read stored-number capacity more broadly. Ask a TCPA attorney before relying on it; full treatment in TCPA for cold callers.

The Per-Call Math: $500, $1,500, and How Call Logs Become Verdicts

Every enforcement track prices violations differently:

Now run the arithmetic the way a plaintiff’s firm does. A 5,000-call campaign dialed into DNC-registered numbers without an exemption is $2.5 million of baseline statutory exposure — $7.5 million if willful or knowing — and one person called ten times is ten violations, with a class action aggregating every violating call in the log.

Real TCPA Settlements and Verdicts

These figures are from court records and press reports — settlements and judgments, not statutes:

• Capital One — $75.5 million class settlement (2014) over autodialed calls to cell phones.
• United States v. Dish Network — $280 million penalty ordered in 2017, resolved in 2020 with Dish paying $210 million.
• Krakauer v. Dish Network — jury verdict trebled to $61 million for 51,000+ calls to DNC-registered numbers.
• Realogy Brokerage Group — $20 million class settlement covering 298,494 class members, final approval January 2025.
• American Income Life Insurance — $14 million class settlement over allegedly unsolicited sales calls, September 2025.
• Zales Jewelers — more than $7.5 million over alleged TCPA violations, September 2025.

None of these were boiler rooms — ordinary companies, and a per-call statute multiplying one process failure across the log.

Who Enforces the TCPA?

Enforcement runs on four tracks, and they stack rather than substitute:

1. The FCC — writes the implementing rules and pursues forfeitures under 47 U.S.C. § 227.
2. The FTC — enforces the parallel Telemarketing Sales Rule, 16 C.F.R. Part 310, at up to $53,088 per violation as of 2026; the figure adjusts with inflation in most Januaries.
3. State attorneys general — expressly authorized by § 227(g) to sue in federal court over pattern-or-practice violations at $500 per violation, trebling available.
4. Private plaintiffs — sue directly under § 227(b)(3) and (c)(5), individually or as class actions, no proof of monetary injury required.

The fourth track is the one that finds ordinary teams: regulators pick targets, private plaintiffs pick whoever called them.

The TCPA Statute of Limitations: Four Years

The TCPA, enacted in 1991, contains no limitations period of its own, so courts apply the federal four-year catch-all in 28 U.S.C. § 1658(a) — no claim may be commenced later than four years after it accrues.

Operationally, a plaintiff filing today can reach calls made in mid-2022, so your defense lives on records that old: signed consent, scrub logs, opt-out timestamps, internal DNC entries. The § 227(c)(5) reasonable-practices defense only works if you can produce the practices — keep compliance records at least four years.

Why Serial TCPA Litigators Change the Math

Per-call damages, no injury requirement, trebling, a four-year lookback, and a class mechanism make repeat litigation economically rational — and a segment of plaintiffs and firms treats the TCPA as exactly that. Two consequences: the plaintiff most likely to sue you has often sued before, which is why many teams screen lists against known-litigator databases — covered in the TCPA litigator list guide — and § 227(c)(5)’s more-than-one-call trigger rewards airtight opt-out handling, because the fastest way to hand a repeat plaintiff a claim is to keep dialing after the first request to stop.

What Changed in 2025–2026

The rules this math runs against, as of July 2026:

• One-to-one consent is dead federally — vacated January 24, 2025 by the Eleventh Circuit in Insurance Marketing Coalition v. FCC, deleted from the FCC’s rules effective August 29, 2025, restoring the prior express written consent standard. State mini-TCPA laws may still impose stricter consent rules on lead-gen forms.
• Revocation is live — since April 11, 2025, consent can be revoked in any reasonable manner, honored within ten business days.
• “Revoke-all” is not in effect — waived until January 31, 2027 and under active FCC reconsideration through a 2025 FNPRM; the date and the rule itself could change again, so check FCC.gov before relying on it.
• AI voices are artificial voices under FCC 24-17 (February 8, 2024) — same consent requirements, same per-call damages as any prerecorded call.
• The FTC’s TSR penalty held at $53,088 for 2026, per the Federal Register notice of July 7, 2026.

Where Enzo Fits — and Where It Doesn’t

Enzo’s compliance surface is deliberately narrow: campaign-level internal DNC. Mark a contact DNC and they stay excluded from that campaign — but marks do not carry across campaigns, so keep your master suppression file outside the dialer and re-apply it to every new campaign. Enzo does not scrub lists against the national or state DNC registries: run every list through a third-party scrubbing service first, then import the clean file. The dialer itself can be operated lawfully; whether your calling is lawful depends on your lists, consent records, and opt-out handling. The rest of the checklist lives in the call center compliance hub.

The math is the message: $500 to $1,500 per call, a four-year lookback, four enforcement tracks. The teams that never see those numbers have boring records — fresh scrubs, signed consent, fast opt-outs, a suppression file that never lapses.

See how campaign-level DNC fits a real calling workflow — book a free discovery call.

Not legal advice. This guide is general information for outbound calling teams, not legal advice. Rules change and apply differently by state, industry, and call type — confirm your program with qualified telemarketing compliance counsel.

Statutory figures from 47 U.S.C. § 227, 28 U.S.C. § 1658, 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200, and 16 C.F.R. Part 310; FTC penalty amount from the Federal Register (July 7, 2026); settlement and verdict figures from court records and press reports — as of July 2026.