Texting Customers Legally: A Plain-English TCPA Primer for Texas Contractors

Texting is the most effective channel most small trades have. It is also governed by the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, where statutory damages run from $500 to $1,500 per message, and where a business texting a few hundred customers without proper consent is looking at a genuinely serious number. This is not a theoretical risk — there is an active plaintiffs' bar that does nothing else.

This is a plain-English overview, not legal advice, and it is not a substitute for asking an attorney about your specific setup. But knowing where the tripwires are will keep you out of most of the trouble.

Why this is worth ten minutes

Most owners assume that because a customer gave them a phone number, they can text it. That is not how the law works. The number being in your phone does not tell you what the customer agreed to receive, and "they hired me, so obviously they want my newsletter" is not a defense anyone has won with.

Consent is the whole game

Nearly every TCPA problem reduces to consent: did this person agree to receive this kind of message, can you prove it, and can you prove when. Two practical implications:

• Capture consent at the point of contact. A checkbox on your website form, a line on your service agreement, a keyword they text to opt in. Not "we assumed."
• Keep the record. What they agreed to, when, and how. If you cannot produce that later, you are effectively in the same position as if it never happened.

Buying, renting, or scraping lists is where businesses get destroyed. There is no version of that which is safe, and no vendor promise that changes it.

Two kinds of message, two standards

The rules distinguish roughly between transactional and marketing messages, and the bar is higher for marketing:

• Transactional — "your tech is 20 minutes out," "here is your invoice," a reply to a call they just made to you. These relate to service the customer asked for. The consent standard is lower, though not zero.
• Marketing — "20% off tune-ups this month," "we now do roofing." Promotional content generally requires prior express written consent, a higher bar than a customer simply giving you their number.

The trap is the blended message. A reminder that ends with "and ask us about our maintenance plans" has just become marketing, and is now held to the higher standard. Keep them separate.

Opt-out is not optional

Every recipient must be able to stop messages, and STOP has to work. In practice:

• Honor STOP, UNSUBSCRIBE, CANCEL, END and QUIT automatically and immediately.
• Send one confirmation, then nothing further.
• Keep a suppression list that every system respects. Opting out of reminders and then getting a review request two weeks later is exactly the pattern that turns an annoyed customer into a plaintiff.
• Observe reasonable hours. Automated systems will happily text at 6am if nobody tells them not to.

Registration, and why texts vanish

Separate from the law, the carriers have their own regime. Business texting over a standard 10-digit number requires 10DLC registration — declaring your brand and your use case. Skip it and your messages get filtered, throttled, or silently dropped. Plenty of owners conclude "texting does not work for us" when the real answer is that they never registered.

What good practice looks like

None of this makes texting a bad idea. It makes it something to set up deliberately:

• Consent captured explicitly, in writing, at the point you get the number.
• Records kept of who consented to what and when.
• Transactional and marketing kept apart.
• STOP handled automatically, across every system.
• 10DLC registered.
• Quiet hours enforced by the system, not by memory.

When we build messaging automations, the opt-out handling, suppression lists and quiet-hours windows are part of the build. What we cannot do is decide for you whether your consent practices are adequate — that is a question for your own attorney, and it is worth the hour.