Georgia Telemarketing Law for Insurance Agents (2026)

Yes, it’s still legal for a licensed Georgia insurance agent to call a lead. What changed on July 1, 2024, is who else can now be pursued when a call goes wrong, and how much it can cost. Senate Bill 73 rewrote a piece of Georgia’s telemarketing statute so that a business can no longer point at a vendor and say it didn’t know the calls were non-compliant, and it opened the door to class actions with attorneys’ fees that the old law didn’t allow. Two months before the bill took effect, a Georgia-based final expense and life insurance marketing firm was already in federal court over exactly the kind of calling pattern SB 73 was built to punish. This article covers what actually changed, what it costs when it goes wrong, and how a Georgia agency keeps calling leads without becoming the next case study.

What Actually Happened to a Georgia Insurance Marketing Firm in 2024

Start with the case, because it’s easier to take a statute seriously once you’ve seen what it looks like applied to a business that sells the same products you do. On May 6, 2024, Kelly Pinn filed a putative class action against Tarkenton Senior Solutions, LLC in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, case number 1:24-cv-01962, assigned to Judge Amy Totenberg. According to Klein Moynihan Turco’s writeup of the complaint, Pinn alleges she received numerous calls promoting Tarkenton’s life and final expense insurance products between February 23 and March 6, 2024, and that her number had been listed on the National Do Not Call Registry since 2009. She says she never gave consent to be called.

The complaint is a putative class action, which means Pinn isn’t just asking for her own damages. She’s asking the court to certify a class covering everyone in the country whose number was on the National Do Not Call Registry and who received at least two telemarketing calls in a 12-month period from Tarkenton or its vendors, going back four years, per Klein Moynihan Turco’s summary. If that class gets certified, the exposure stops being about one plaintiff’s four calls and starts being about however many thousands of calls the company’s dialing history actually contains. That’s the mechanism a mini-TCPA with a class-action provision is designed to create, and it’s the exact provision Georgia added a few weeks after this case was filed.

Nothing about this case is exotic. It isn’t a rogue actor running an illegal robocall operation from overseas. It’s a licensed insurance marketing business selling a completely legitimate product category, final expense and life insurance, to a lead list that apparently wasn’t scrubbed against a registry that’s been public and free to check for two decades. That’s the ordinary failure mode this article is about, and it’s the one Georgia’s legislature specifically made more expensive to repeat.

Why Georgia Got More Dangerous for Insurance Telemarketing

Georgia’s telemarketing statute isn’t new. O.C.G.A. Section 46-5-27 has required callers to honor a state-maintained do-not-call list, disclose their identity, and avoid blocking caller ID for years, with the state’s Public Service Commission maintaining the registry and, per the commission’s own consumer guidance, restricting live solicitor calls to between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m. What SB 73 did was change who can be held responsible when those rules get broken, and it did it in a way that specifically targets the outsourced-vendor model a lot of insurance marketing runs on.

Before the amendment, per Klein Moynihan Turco’s analysis of the bill Governor Kemp signed on May 6, 2024, a business that hired a telemarketing vendor or bought leads from a third-party generator could often defend itself by arguing it hadn’t made the call and wasn’t aware the vendor’s calling practices were non-compliant. That argument required a plaintiff to prove an agency relationship in court, which isn’t always straightforward. SB 73 added language reaching the entity a solicitation was made “on behalf of,” and the National Law Review’s coverage of the bill describes the practical effect plainly: it’s no longer a defense that the defendant didn’t personally make the call or claims not to have known the call violated the statute, unless the business had established and actually enforced written policies and procedures to prevent it. The bill also, per both firms’ coverage, explicitly opened the statute to class actions with attorneys’ fees, which the earlier version of the law didn’t clearly allow.

Put together, that’s three separate changes stacking on top of each other: the party who benefits from the call, not just the party who dials it, can now be sued directly; claiming ignorance about a vendor’s practices stopped being an automatic shield; and a single bad list can now become a class action instead of one plaintiff’s individual claim. Each of those changes independently raises the cost of getting this wrong. Combined, they change the math on whether outsourcing your calling to “someone who says they’re compliant” is actually a way to reduce risk, or just a way to lose visibility into it.

What a Violation Actually Costs

Run the two statutes side by side, because they don’t replace each other. They stack.

Do the arithmetic on a realistic list, not a worst case. Say an agency calls 200 numbers off a list it didn’t scrub against the National Do Not Call Registry, and every one of those numbers turns out to already be registered. Under the federal statute alone, at the $500 base figure, that’s a theoretical exposure of $100,000; at the $1,500 willful figure, $300,000. Layer Georgia’s own $2,000-per-knowing-violation figure from O.C.G.A. Section 46-5-27 on top of the federal number for the same 200 calls, and the state-law exposure alone reaches $400,000, separate from and additional to whatever the federal claim is worth. Add a class action’s attorneys’ fees, which SB 73 now explicitly permits, and the number stops being about 200 calls and starts being about however many calls the same non-compliant list or vendor relationship generated over the four-year lookback period a private right of action typically covers.

None of this means every violation settles at the statutory maximum. Most TCPA cases settle for a fraction of the theoretical ceiling, and Pinn v. Tarkenton Senior Solutions is still pending as of this writing, with no judgment or settlement on the public docket. But the ceiling is what a plaintiff’s attorney is negotiating against, and it’s the number that should be driving how much process an agency puts around its outbound list before the first call goes out, not after a complaint arrives.

Federal TCPA vs. Georgia’s Mini-TCPA, Side by Side

The two statutes ask for genuinely different things in a few places, which is exactly why compliance built only around the federal rule leaves a Georgia-specific gap. A national DNC scrub doesn’t automatically cover Georgia’s own state registry. A federal consent record doesn’t automatically satisfy Georgia’s identity-disclosure requirement. An agency that’s confident it’s TCPA-compliant because it uses a reputable dialer platform can still be exposed under O.C.G.A. Section 46-5-27 if nobody separately checked the state list.

The Four Compliance Layers Every Georgia Insurance Call Has to Clear

This is the part worth giving away completely, because none of it requires buying anything. It requires building a process and actually following it, which is the same thing SB 73’s one remaining defense demands anyway.

1. Scrub against the National Do Not Call Registry before every campaign, not once. Registration doesn’t expire, and the registry updates constantly. A list scrubbed six months ago is stale. This is table stakes under the federal TCPA regardless of what state you’re calling into.
2. Scrub against Georgia’s own state do-not-call database separately. Per the Georgia Public Service Commission’s consumer guidance, this is a distinct list from the national one, and a national-only scrub leaves a real gap for Georgia numbers specifically. If your dialer or CRM only checks one registry, confirm which one, because the answer matters here.
3. Capture and store consent with a timestamp, not a checkbox that disappears. If a lead came from a website form, a TrustedForm-style certificate or an equivalent audit trail that proves what the consumer agreed to and when is the difference between a defensible record and a guess. If consent came from an existing customer relationship, document the relationship’s dates, since Georgia’s exemption for prior business relationships has time limits.
4. Put your compliance policy in writing, train on it, and keep evidence you enforced it. This is the specific requirement SB 73 raised the bar on. A policy that exists only as a clause in a vendor contract, never trained on internally and never checked, is not what the amended statute treats as a defense. A policy your team can point to, with training records and a documented escalation process for opt-outs, is.
5. Vet every vendor and lead source the same way you’d vet your own calling, because Georgia law now can hold you responsible for it. Ask a lead vendor directly how they scrub against both national and Georgia-specific registries, and get it in writing. If they can’t answer specifically, that’s the answer.
6. Honor opt-outs immediately and permanently, across every channel a lead can reach you through. A DNC request made on a call has to stop calls, texts, and any other outbound contact from that number going forward, not just future dials from the same list.
7. Keep call and consent records for as long as the applicable lookback period runs. Georgia’s own private right of action and the federal TCPA both allow claims that look back years, not weeks. If your records don’t go back that far, you can’t defend a claim that does.

How TheAffordableAI Handles This

None of this replaces the consent and DNC-scrubbing work above. It’s infrastructure that makes that work auditable instead of something you’re reconstructing after a demand letter arrives. If you want to hear what an actual disclosure and call flow sounds like before deciding anything, there’s a demo call on the homepage. You can also build an equivalent process yourself with a compliant dialer, a documented scrub routine, and a CRM that logs consent properly; plenty of agencies do exactly that, and it’s worth pricing against a managed platform before choosing either path.

Where This Isn’t the Right Fix

Be honest about the limits, because a vendor pitch that promises to make legal risk disappear is a bigger red flag than the risk itself. No calling platform, AI or human, removes the requirement that consent exist before a call is placed. No CRM sync substitutes for an agency actually building and enforcing the written compliance policy SB 73’s remaining defense requires; the sync makes an existing policy verifiable, it doesn’t create the policy for you. And if your agency’s real problem is a lead source that was never properly consented in the first place, better call logging just produces a cleaner record of a bad practice rather than fixing it. The fix for that starts upstream, at whoever is generating or selling you the leads, not at the dialer.

What You Actually Get

Concretely, a documented consent and do-not-call process turns a real, currently-litigated risk, the kind Pinn v. Tarkenton Senior Solutions represents, into a manageable operational cost instead of an open-ended one. It means an opt-out gets honored the moment it’s requested instead of whenever someone updates a list. It means if a complaint ever does arrive, the agency has a timestamped record to produce instead of a shrug.

What it doesn’t do is eliminate the underlying legal obligation or promise a specific outcome in litigation. Every fact pattern is different, statutory damages caps and defenses can shift with future amendments, and this article reflects a review of the cited statutes, regulations, and case filings as published as of the date above; it’s general information, not legal advice for your specific agency. Talk to counsel licensed in Georgia before finalizing a compliance policy, especially the written-policy defense SB 73 now leans on.

Georgia’s telemarketing statute didn’t get harder to follow. It got more expensive to ignore, and it started reaching further up the chain than it used to. A documented scrub against both DNC registries, real consent records, and a written policy your team actually follows costs a fraction of what one uncontested class action would, and it’s the same process a well-run agency should be running regardless of which state’s number just lit up on the dialer.