Telephone Solicitation Business Registration Act

A seller may not make a telephone solicitation from a location in Texas or to a purchaser located in Texas unless it holds a registration certificate from the Secretary of State for each business location from which it solicits, obtained on a verified registration statement, a $200 filing fee and $10,000 in security, renewed annually and updated each quarter with the salespeople who solicited for it.

A telephone solicitation is a call or other transmission, including a text or graphic message or an image, initiated by a seller or salesperson to induce a person to purchase, rent, claim or receive an item, and includes a call a purchaser makes in response to a solicitation sent by mail or other means.

Senate Bill 140, effective September 1, 2025 for conduct on or after that date, redefined telephone solicitation in those terms and gave the chapter the chapter 304 definition of telephone call, which includes a text message to a mobile number. The Senate Research Center's analysis of the bill states that chapter 302 previously did not define telephone call or contemplate text messaging.

The chapter does not apply to, among others, a person offering qualified securities, a publicly traded corporation registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission or the State Securities Board or its subsidiary or agent, an insurance licensee on an Insurance Code transaction, a supervised financial institution or its affiliate, an educational institution or 501(c)(3) nonprofit, a seller of newspaper, magazine or cable subscriptions, a food seller, a sale to a business buying for resale or manufacturing, a seller soliciting a former or current customer under the same business name for at least two years, a seller who only arranges a later face-to-face sales presentation, a retailer operating a store under the same name for at least two years where most of its business is at the store, or an isolated transaction.

Before a telephone-solicited sale is completed, the seller must give the purchaser the street address of the calling location and its principal location and, where it offers a free item, a below-market price or an oil, gas or mineral interest, the information the chapter specifies.

Knowingly violating the registration, quarterly-addendum, posting, disclosure or no-compliance-reference duties, knowingly acting as a salesperson for an unregistered seller, or requiring a credit card or checking account number as a condition of receiving an item offered free is a Class A misdemeanor. The Attorney General may enjoin a violation and recover a civil penalty of up to $5,000 for each violation, rising to $25,000 per violation and $50,000 in aggregate for violating an injunction.

A violation of this chapter is a false, misleading or deceptive act under the Deceptive Trade Practices Act, whose public and private remedies may enforce it. That Act lets a prevailing consumer recover economic damages, increased up to three times for a knowing violation, plus attorney's fees, after the consumer gives the business 60 days' written pre-suit notice of the claim.

A claimant who has recovered under a private action arising from a violation of the chapter more than once is not limited in a future recovery.