The marketing text is the one the TCPA covers
"Your technician is 20 minutes out" is a transactional message. The customer booked the appointment and the text is about that appointment. "Tune-up special, $89 through March" is marketing, and under the TCPA a marketing text sent with an automated system needs prior express written consent from the person holding the phone. Treat any tool that sends to a list as an automated system.
The consent comes from three places in a normal shop. A checkbox on the web form that ships unchecked, with wording beside it that names your company and says the customer agrees to receive marketing texts at that number. A line above the signature on the service ticket. A booking call where the CSR asks for it and the recording is kept. A phone number the homeowner gave dispatch so the technician could find the driveway is none of those things.
The number has to be registered with the carriers
US carriers require business texting from a standard ten-digit number to be registered under 10DLC: a brand, which is your company and its tax ID, and a campaign, which is the use case you declare. Unregistered traffic gets filtered or blocked. The shop finds out in March, when the send goes to 3,000 people and the phone does not ring.
The texting vendor or the field software usually files the registration. Ask whether it was filed and approved, and ask which use case is on the campaign. A campaign registered for appointment reminders and then used for a promotion can get its marketing traffic filtered. We check the registration during the audit week, along with the field software it runs on.
Revocation has had a deadline since April 2025
The FCC's revocation rules took effect on April 11, 2025. A customer can revoke consent by any reasonable means: replying STOP, replying "quit", writing "please stop texting me" in a sentence, telling the CSR on the phone, sending an email. The business honors it within 10 business days. One confirmation text is allowed, and it should say that the messages have stopped and nothing else.
Texting platforms catch STOP on their own. They can miss "take me off this list please", which is closer to how people actually write. Someone in the office reads the replies to a marketing send on the day it goes out and pulls those numbers by hand.
Federal hours run 8 am to 9 pm where the customer lives
The window is measured in the recipient's time zone, so a shop near a time zone line has to look at where the number sits. Some states are tighter than the federal rule and Florida is one of them. A company working two states runs everything on the stricter clock.
How often to text is a business decision with one legal constraint on it. One marketing text a month is plenty for an HVAC list. A tune-up offer in March, a heat wave message in June and a furnace reminder in October make a full year of texting, and they keep the opt-out rate low enough that the list is still there next spring. The spring campaign is built off that list, and every opt-out takes a name off it for good.
What goes in the text
The company name goes in the first few words, because the number is unfamiliar and the homeowner is deciding whether to read the rest. One offer with the price on it. One link, to a page that shows real appointment slots. One line saying how to stop. Anything past two screens on a phone gets scrolled by.
A purchased lead is a different case
The FCC's one-to-one consent rule for lead generators was vacated by the Eleventh Circuit on January 24, 2025. A marketplace can still sell one homeowner's request to four contractors at once, the way Angi and Thumbtack always have. That ruling covered what the lead seller has to collect. Your side of it did not move: an automated marketing text to a purchased lead still needs consent that names your company.
So call the lead. On a request four contractors bought, the phone beats a text anyway, and the call is where the CSR can ask for consent and get the answer on the recording.
The consent wording on the form, on the ticket and in the call script goes past a lawyer once, and then gets reused for years. Everything after that is operations: who reads the replies, who pulls the plain-language opt-outs, and whether the tune-ups booked off a send get counted at all. Tag the booking link on every send with its own source. Otherwise the visits arrive as direct traffic, the report credits them to nobody, and the channel that filled a slow March looks like it did nothing.