Pennsylvania Texting Rules for Loan Officers: PA Act 47
If your team texts or calls Pennsylvania borrowers, your send windows and consent handling have to change this week. Pennsylvania's Act 47 of 2026 takes effect October 18, and it treats a text message the same as a sales call, narrows the hours you can reach people, and bans Sunday calls outright. Anything in your CRM set to fire a follow-up at 8pm or on a Sunday morning is about to be sending at a time the law no longer allows.
Quick answer: The new Pennsylvania texting rules under PA Act 47, effective October 18, 2026, define text messages and ringless voicemail as telephone solicitations, narrow calling and texting hours to 9am-7pm, ban all calls and texts on Sundays, and require prior express written consent. A sales team texting Pennsylvania borrowers must tighten its CRM send windows and consent records before the law goes live.
A plain-English summary for operators, not legal advice. Your compliance team or attorney decides your actual policy. What follows is what the law appears to change and what it means for the automated follow-up your team already runs.
What changes on October 18 under PA Act 47
Four things change for anyone contacting Pennsylvania consumers by phone or text. Per a competitor's compliance analysis of Act 47 of 2026, signed July 20, this is the first substantial rewrite of the state's telemarketing statute in years, and it pushes Pennsylvania past the federal baseline that most CRMs are set to.
- Texts and ringless voicemail are now telephone solicitations by definition. The old assumption that a text was lighter-touch than a call no longer holds under this statute.
- Calling and texting hours narrow to 9am-7pm. The old window matched the federal 8am-9pm, so you lose an hour on each end.
- No calls or texts at all on Sundays. There was no Sunday ban before.
- The consent exclusion tightens to require prior express written consent. A verbal "sure, text me" is no longer the same thing as a signed, documented opt-in.
Pennsylvania is one of several states passing "mini-TCPA" laws that go further than the federal rule. TCPA is the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act, the rulebook most texting and dialer tools build their defaults around. The point for your team is that the federal defaults in your CRM are now looser than Pennsylvania allows, and the gap is on you to close.
Why your current CRM send windows are now wrong
Most CRMs ship with send windows set to the federal standard, which means your Pennsylvania follow-up is probably scheduled to fire outside the new legal hours. If your automated sequences in a CRM like Follow Up Boss are set to the common 8am-9pm window, you are now scheduled to text or call Pennsylvania contacts for one hour too early in the morning and two hours too late at night, every day, plus all day Sunday.
Here is the practical gap, before and after October 18:
| Rule | Old (federal baseline) | PA Act 47, Oct 18 |
|---|---|---|
| Earliest contact | 8am | 9am |
| Latest contact | 9pm | 7pm |
| Sunday contact | Allowed | Banned |
| Text status | Often treated as lighter | Counts as a solicitation |
| Consent needed | Varies | Prior express written consent |
The trap is time zones. A drip set to "6pm" fires at 6pm wherever your CRM thinks the contact is. If your office is Central and the borrower is in Pennsylvania, a 6pm send lands at 7pm their time, right at the new cutoff, and a 6:30pm send is already past it. Send windows that look fine in your dashboard can still fire at a non-compliant moment for the person actually receiving them.
What it means for automated follow-up
Automated follow-up is exactly where this bites, because the whole point of a sequence is that nobody is watching the clock when it sends. The fix is not to turn automation off. It is to make the automation respect the contact's local time and the new quiet hours, so a step that comes due on a Sunday or at 8pm holds and goes out the next allowed window instead.
Three things to check in whatever runs your follow-up:
- Narrow the allowed send window for Pennsylvania contacts to 9am-7pm, and confirm the window is calculated in the contact's time zone, not your office's.
- Add Sunday as a no-send day for calls and texts to those contacts, with the step rolling to Monday.
- Separate consented contacts from the rest, so a sequence only fires at people whose written opt-in your compliance team has cleared.
This is a problem worth solving carefully because your follow-up is already where deals leak. We've written before about why lead follow-up automation dies the moment a lead replies and why new leads go cold in Follow Up Boss. A new quiet-hour rule adds one more place a well-meaning sequence can misfire: it keeps sending, just at a time it is no longer allowed to.
SalesOS, the part of AI Cofounder we build for sales teams, can hold a follow-up step until the contact's local time is inside the window your compliance team sets, so the sequence keeps running without firing on a Sunday or at 8pm their time. It follows the rules your team defines; it does not decide them, and nothing here makes any automation "TCPA-safe" or "compliant" on its own. Your compliance team sets the policy, and the system respects it.
Manual workaround vs. a system that respects the window
You can handle this by hand, and some teams will. The manual way is to retrain everyone to never text or call Pennsylvania contacts before 9am, after 7pm, or on Sundays, and to check each contact's time zone before they hit send. That works until it's 6:45pm, someone is clearing their list, and they don't do the mental math on the Eastern-time borrower.
The difference is where the rule lives. Done manually, the rule lives in each person's memory, which is the same place lead follow-up already leaks. Done in the system, the rule lives in the send logic: a step that comes due outside the window simply waits and goes out at the next allowed time, the same for every rep and every contact, without anyone remembering.
Common pitfalls when adjusting for Act 47
The mistakes here are the quiet kind, where everything looks fine in the dashboard and the sends are still wrong. A few to watch for:
- Setting the window in your office time zone instead of the contact's. A 7pm cutoff on your clock is already past the cutoff for a borrower an hour east of you.
- Fixing the drip sequences but forgetting the dialer, or fixing calls but leaving texts on the old window now that texts count as solicitations.
- Treating an old verbal "yes, text me" as consent. Act 47 tightens the exclusion to prior express written consent, so your compliance team has to decide which existing contacts still qualify.
- Applying one blanket window to your whole database. The rule is tied to where the contact is, so a mixed-state list needs per-contact handling, not one setting.
- Assuming a vendor's "compliant" label covers you. No tool is compliant on its own; it does what you configure, and your compliance team owns the configuration.
FAQ
When does PA Act 47 take effect?
Pennsylvania Act 47 of 2026 takes effect October 18, 2026. It was signed on July 20, 2026, and is the first substantial rewrite of the state's telemarketing statute in years.
Do texts count as telemarketing under the new Pennsylvania rules?
Text messages count as telephone solicitations under PA Act 47, and so does ringless voicemail. That means your automated text follow-up to Pennsylvania contacts is now subject to the same hour limits and consent requirements as a sales call, where before many teams treated texting as lighter-touch.
What are the new loan officer calling hours in Pennsylvania?
Calling and texting hours in Pennsylvania narrow to 9am-7pm under Act 47, with no calls or texts allowed on Sundays. The old window was 8am-9pm with no Sunday ban, so loan officers lose an hour on each end of the day plus all of Sunday.
Is this legal advice for my mortgage team?
No. The post is a plain-English summary for operators so you can brief your compliance team and adjust your tools. Your compliance team or attorney decides your actual policy on send windows, consent, and which contacts you can text.
How do I keep automated follow-up running without breaking the new rules?
Configure your follow-up to calculate send times in each contact's local time zone and to hold any step that comes due outside 9am-7pm or on a Sunday, rolling it to the next allowed window. Keep consented contacts separate so sequences only fire at people your compliance team has cleared.
If you want to see how follow-up can keep going for your Pennsylvania pipeline while respecting per-contact time zones and the quiet-hour windows your compliance team sets, book a demo and we'll walk through your current send windows and where they'd need to change.
About Terrell Gentry
Founder at 6omb
Terrell is the founder of 6omb and runs Claude Community, the #1 Skool community for Voice AI agents. Over 16 months his team has built 100+ AI agent systems delivering $10M+ in business value, including voice agents like Emily, which booked 453 new clients for a law firm in 8 months. He is a Y Combinator Startup School alum (SUS20) and a Gold Retell partner.
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