Oregon Telemarketing Law 2026: Insurance Agent Guide

Yes, it’s still legal to call an insurance lead in Oregon, but as of January 1, 2026, the legal window got a lot narrower and a lot wider at the same time. Narrower, because House Bill 3865 now bars any telephone solicitation, call or text, outside 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., or more than three separate contacts to the same person in 24 hours. Wider, because that rule no longer applies only to autodialers and prerecorded messages the way Oregon’s old law did; it applies to every telephone solicitation, including a licensed agent manually dialing from a spreadsheet. Insurance marketing didn’t get an exemption the way debt collection did. This article covers exactly what HB 3865 changed, what a violation costs under Oregon’s consumer protection statute, how it stacks with the federal TCPA, and how an Oregon agency keeps calling and texting leads without stepping outside the new window.

What Oregon’s House Bill 3865 Actually Changed

House Bill 3865, according to the enrolled bill’s own text, amended five sections spanning two different parts of Oregon law: ORS 646.561 and 646.563, which define unlawful trade practices generally, and ORS 646A.370, 646A.372, and 646A.374, which govern automatic dialing and announcing devices specifically. Before this amendment, those two tracks did different jobs. The general unlawful-practices section covered misrepresentation and a called party’s request not to be contacted again, but carried no blanket calling-hours restriction of its own. The automatic-dialing section did carry hours, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., but only for calls placed through an automated device, not a human dialing by hand.

HB 3865 rewrote both tracks. On the general side, the amended ORS 646.563(1)(b) now states plainly that a person engages in an unlawful practice if they initiate “a telephone solicitation outside the hours of 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.” or initiate “a solicitation more than three separate times to a party within a 24-hour period,” unless an established business relationship exists. That rule doesn’t mention autodialers, AI, or any particular technology. It applies to the telephone solicitation itself, which means a human insurance agent manually working a call list from a laptop is bound by it exactly the same as an automated system would be. On the automated-device side, ORS 646A.372(5)(a) separately tightened the automatic dialing and announcing device window from the old 9 a.m.-to-9 p.m. standard down to 8 a.m.-to-8 p.m., matching the new general rule.

Both changes matter for different reasons. The narrower autodialer hours are a straightforward tightening, one hour off each end of the day. The new general rule is the bigger deal, because it closes a gap that used to exist for live, human-dialed calls. An agent who called a purchased lead list at 8:30 p.m. by hand, without an autodialer, wasn’t clearly breaking Oregon’s old telemarketing statute. Under the amended ORS 646.563(1)(b), that same call now is, regardless of whether a machine or a person placed it.

Text Messages Are Telephone Solicitations Now

The second structural change is the one most agencies miss, because it doesn’t sound like a calling-hours rule at all: Oregon redefined what counts as a “telephone solicitation” in the first place. The amended ORS 646.561(4)(a) defines it as a solicitation made to a party “by means of: (A) A call on a telephone or telephone line; or (B) A text message.” The parallel definition in ORS 646A.370(2), covering automatic dialing devices, adds the same language to what counts as a “call.” A text message isn’t treated as a separate, lighter-touch channel under Oregon law anymore. It’s the same regulated act as a phone call.

The bill also extended the misrepresentation ban and the opt-out honoring requirement to texts specifically. Under the amended ORS 646.563(1)(a), if “the called or texted party states a desire not to be called or texted again” and the solicitor “makes a subsequent telephone solicitation of the called or texted party at that number,” that’s its own separate unlawful practice, on top of whatever the hours or frequency violation would be. And under the amended ORS 646A.374(2), a caller using an automatic dialing device can’t misrepresent their identity or purpose “in any text message to the subscriber,” language that didn’t exist in the statute before this amendment.

What a Violation Actually Costs

HB 3865 didn’t write a new penalty schedule. Instead, per the enrolled bill’s own text, a violation of the amended ORS 646.563 is itself defined as “an unlawful practice,” which routes straight into Oregon’s existing Unlawful Trade Practices Act and the private right of action in ORS 646.638. That statute lets an injured party “recover actual damages or statutory damages of $200, whichever is greater,” and lets the court award punitive damages, equitable relief, and reasonable attorney fees to a prevailing plaintiff. A claim has to be brought within one year of discovering the violation, per the same section.

Unlike the flat per-violation figures in Georgia’s or Virginia’s telemarketing statutes, Oregon’s own text doesn’t spell out whether the $200 statutory floor multiplies across every non-compliant call, or attaches once per lawsuit. What the statute does establish clearly is that each call or text outside 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., or beyond the third contact in 24 hours, is independently defined as its own unlawful practice under ORS 646.563(1). Treating each one as a separately actionable event, which is how Oregon’s UTPA class-action provision in ORS 646.638(8) is written, that section requires class members to show an “ascertainable loss” from a “reckless or knowing use,” a standard tied to individual instances of the practice, not a single lump claim.

None of this is a prediction that a specific number of after-hours calls resolves at these figures. It’s the ceiling a plaintiff’s attorney negotiates against, and Oregon’s statute specifically authorizes recovering reasonable attorney fees on top of it, which is exactly the kind of provision that makes even a modest individual claim worth filing.

Oregon’s Statute vs. the Federal TCPA, Side by Side

The gap that matters most for an agency that already thinks of itself as TCPA-compliant is the “covers live, human-dialed calls” row. The federal TCPA’s teeth are mostly aimed at autodialers, prerecorded messages, and the Do Not Call Registry. A licensed agent dialing a purchased list by hand at 8:15 p.m., without an autodialer and without calling anyone on the DNC registry, isn’t clearly breaking federal law. Under Oregon’s amended ORS 646.563(1)(b), that same call is a state-law violation, full stop, unless an established business relationship covers it. The two statutes overlap in places and diverge in others; a call can clear one and fail the other.

The Established Business Relationship Exemption, and Its Limits

Give this the attention it deserves, because it’s the one thing in HB 3865 that actually creates room to keep calling. ORS 646.561(2) defines an established business relationship as “a previous transaction or series of transactions between a caller and a party that occurred within the 18 months that preceded a call.” Where that relationship exists, the calling-hours and three-contact cap in ORS 646.563(1)(b) doesn’t apply. The parallel provisions in ORS 646A.372 extend the same exemption to the automatic-dialing rules on hours, the do-not-call list check, and, for callers with an established relationship, even the opt-out mechanism requirement.

What qualifies as a transaction isn’t defined further in the statute, but the ordinary reading covers a sold policy, a completed quote request the person actually submitted, a renewal, or an active client relationship. What doesn’t qualify: a name and number bought from a lead aggregator who never transacted with your agency directly, a scraped list, or a client relationship that ended more than 18 months before the call. The clock resets from the call date backward, not from when the relationship began, so a client who last renewed 20 months ago no longer falls inside the exemption even if they’ve been with the agency for a decade.

The established-business-relationship exemption never touches the misrepresentation ban or the requirement to stop contacting someone who has asked not to be contacted again. Those apply regardless of the relationship. It’s a narrow exemption for hours and frequency, on a specific list of people your agency can actually document a transaction with, not a general pass for existing customers on everything the statute covers.

How Insurance Agents in Oregon Stay Compliant

None of this requires a new vendor. It requires knowing which calls need the exemption and which don’t, and building the schedule around the actual window instead of the old one.

1. Confirm your dialer and text platform enforce 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., not 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. If your CRM or dialer was configured to the old Oregon or federal TSR window, it’s now sending calls or texts into an hour on each end that’s no longer legal for a non-exempt contact.
2. Count texts against the same three-contact cap as calls. A sequence built as “call, then text, then call again” is three touches under ORS 646.563(1)(b), regardless of channel. A fourth touch to the same person inside 24 hours is a violation whether it’s a call or a text.
3. Tag every lead with whether an established business relationship actually exists, and when the underlying transaction happened. A CRM field that just says “existing client” isn’t enough if it doesn’t also track the date, since the 18-month window is measured from the call date, not from account creation.
4. Treat a purchased or aggregated lead list as outside the exemption by default. Unless your agency can point to its own transaction with that specific person inside the last 18 months, the full hours and frequency cap applies, and no vendor assurance that the lead “opted in somewhere” changes that.
5. Log every attempt with a timestamp, not just outcomes. If a complaint or a claim ever arrives, the question will be whether a specific call or text landed inside the 8 a.m.-8 p.m. window and within the three-contact cap. A call log that only shows “dialed” without a time isn’t a record that can answer that.
6. Honor a “don’t contact me again” request across every channel immediately. Under the amended ORS 646.563(1)(a), a subsequent solicitation after someone states that they don’t want to be called or texted again is its own separate unlawful practice, on top of any hours or frequency issue.
7. Don’t rely on the identity-misrepresentation ban being a technology-specific rule. ORS 646.563(1)(c) and ORS 646A.374(2) both bar misrepresenting who’s calling or texting and why, whether the message came from a person, a script, or an AI system. Accurate caller ID and an honest stated purpose aren’t optional based on which technology placed the contact.

Where Oregon’s Law Doesn’t Reach

Be straight about what HB 3865 doesn’t do. It doesn’t touch federal TCPA consent requirements, so a call or text that’s fine under Oregon’s hours and frequency rule can still need prior express consent, or prior express written consent for a marketing message, under 47 U.S.C. Section 227. It doesn’t create a state Do Not Call registry check separate from the National Do Not Call Registry the way some states’ statutes do; the automatic-dialing provisions in ORS 646A.372(4) reference an “official list that a government agency compiled,” but the bill doesn’t stand up a new Oregon-specific registry of its own. And it doesn’t say anything about AI disclosure specifically; an AI caller in Oregon has to follow the same hours, frequency, and identity rules a human caller does, but Oregon’s telemarketing statute isn’t the source of any separate AI-disclosure obligation the way Utah’s or California’s AI disclosure laws are.

If your agency’s actual problem is a lead source that never captured real consent in the first place, tightening your calling hours to 8 a.m.-8 p.m. doesn’t fix that. The consent question and the hours-and-frequency question are separate obligations that both apply on the same call.

How TheAffordableAI Handles This

None of this replaces knowing which leads carry an established business relationship and which don’t. A managed caller can enforce a schedule; it can’t tell you whether a purchased list actually has a documented transaction behind it. If you want to hear what an actual disclosure and call flow sounds like before deciding anything, there’s a live demo call on the homepage. You can also build an equivalent scheduling and logging process yourself with a compliant dialer and a CRM field that actually tracks transaction dates; plenty of agencies do exactly that, and it’s worth pricing against a managed platform on the pricing page before choosing either path.

What You Actually Get

Concretely, knowing the actual window, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., three contacts a day, calls and texts counted together, turns a rule an agency could easily get wrong by an hour or a channel into something a dialer and a CRM field can enforce without a human double-checking the clock every afternoon. It means a text follow-up sequence gets built against the same cap the calls already respect, instead of accidentally becoming the fourth touch of the day. It means an established-business-relationship claim is something the agency can actually point to a transaction date for, rather than a category on a spreadsheet nobody can defend if it’s ever questioned.

What it doesn’t do is eliminate the underlying legal obligation, or promise a specific outcome if a dispute arises. Every fact pattern is different, and this article reflects a review of the cited statutes and coverage as of the publish date; it’s general information, not legal advice for your specific agency. Talk to counsel licensed in Oregon before finalizing a compliance policy built around these rules.

Oregon’s telemarketing statute used to leave a real gap for a human dialing by hand instead of an autodialer. HB 3865 closed it, narrowed the clock by an hour on each end, and pulled text messages into the same rule calls already lived under. None of that requires new software to follow. It requires a dialer and a CRM that actually enforce 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., count texts against the same three-contact cap as calls, and know the difference between a documented 18-month relationship and a list someone else compiled.