Cannabis SMS Quiet Hours by State
The federal TCPA baseline is 8am–9pm in the recipient's local time. Several states stack additional restrictions. Multi-state operators have to honor the strictest applicable window per recipient.
Recipient timezone, not your headquarters timezone.
Quiet hours are calculated from the recipient's location, not the sender's. A Denver dispensary scheduling a 8:30am Mountain send is messaging California subscribers at 7:30am Pacific — outside the federal quiet-hour baseline.
Most enforcement actions and class-action complaints involving SMS timing trace to recipient-timezone errors, not malice. The fix is platform-side enforcement so nobody on the team has to do the timezone math under pressure.
Beyond the federal baseline, a few states (notably FL, OK, and a handful of consumer-protection regimes) extend the protected window. The platform enforces the strictest applicable rule per recipient automatically.
Built for cannabis, not generic retail.
Per-recipient timezone math
Every send is evaluated against the recipient's local time, not your scheduling timezone.
Strictest-rule enforcement
Federal baseline plus any state-level extension applied automatically — operators don't memorize the matrix.
Defer instead of skip
Messages that would fall in quiet hours are deferred to the next allowed window, not silently dropped.
Multi-state campaign safety
A single brand-wide send respects 50 different quiet-hour windows without splintering into 50 campaigns.
Per-send timestamp record
Every delivery carries the recipient timezone and the applicable rule at the moment of send.
Pre-send violation preview
The scheduler warns before launch if a campaign would defer a meaningful share of the audience.
Questions buyers ask before booking.
What's the TCPA federal quiet-hour window?+
8:00am to 9:00pm in the recipient's local time. Outside that window, marketing SMS is presumed non-consensual unless the subscriber has explicitly authorized different timing.
Which states extend the federal baseline?+
Florida's mini-TCPA, several state UDAP regimes, and emerging consumer-protection rules in CA, WA, and others can extend protected hours or add written-consent specifics. Always check current law with counsel for your operating states.
Does the recipient's billing address determine timezone?+
Typically yes when known, with mobile area code as fallback. Mobile numbers travel, so the platform prefers explicit subscriber-set timezone when available.
Can a subscriber opt into off-hours messaging?+
In principle, yes — with explicit, separately disclosed consent for after-hours communication. In practice, very few operators offer this because the audit complexity outweighs the marginal reach.
How do automated flows handle quiet hours?+
Triggered messages that would fire in quiet hours are deferred to the next allowed window. The flow doesn't break and the message isn't lost — it just lands when the subscriber can legally receive it.
What about transactional messages like order-ready alerts?+
Service messages tied to an active customer transaction have a narrower restriction window in practice, but the safest posture is to honor the same quiet-hour rules for everything. The audit cost of getting it wrong is higher than the inconvenience of a deferred order-ready ping.
Get quiet-hour enforcement off your campaign manager's checklist.
We'll audit your current scheduling against recipient-timezone rules and turn enforcement on platform-wide.