Is the FCC's One-to-One Consent Rule for TCPA in Effect in 2026?

No, the FCC's one-to-one consent rule for the TCPA is not in effect in 2026. The Eleventh Circuit vacated it in January 2025, ruling the FCC exceeded its statutory authority, and the FCC's prior "prior express written consent" standard governs instead.

What the Rule Would Have Required

The vacated rule would have required a lead generator to get consent to be contacted by one specific seller at a time, rather than letting a single consent cover multiple co-branded sellers listed on the same lead form — which is why it mattered so much to comparison-shopping and lead-gen marketing models that route one form submission to several buyers.

The Court's Reasoning

In Insurance Marketing Coalition v. FCC, the Eleventh Circuit held the FCC exceeded the authority Congress gave it over "prior express consent" under the TCPA, vacated the rule, and remanded the matter back to the agency rather than leaving a modified version in place. The petitioner's name is itself a clue to who felt the rule's impact hardest: insurance lead generation runs heavily on shared-form, multi-buyer consent, which is exactly the model the one-to-one rule would have broken.

The Timeline That Made This Confusing

The rule was originally set to take effect January 27, 2025. The FCC itself pushed that date back to January 26, 2026 for the one-to-one provision shortly before the Eleventh Circuit's ruling landed, so the postponement and the vacatur arrived almost on top of each other — which is a large part of why marketers still ask whether some version of it quietly took hold anyway. It didn't: the vacatur mooted the postponed date entirely.

What Governs Now

With the rule vacated, the FCC's prior standard for "prior express written consent" applies — a single consent can still, in principle, cover multiple sellers named on the same form, as it did before the vacated rule was adopted. One legal tracker reports the FCC formally reinstated that prior standard by order on August 29, 2025. The FCC has not issued a confirmed replacement as of this writing; the agency's stated options after the ruling were to appeal, substantially revise the rule, or pursue a different approach.

Both Calls and Texts Are Still Covered

The underlying TCPA — separate from the vacated rule — still applies its per-violation damages structure to both unsolicited calls and texts sent without proper consent, so the vacatur doesn't lower baseline compliance risk for either channel.

Bottom Line

Don't rebuild lead-gen consent flows around a one-to-one requirement that a federal appeals court vacated, but don't treat that vacatur as blanket cover either — confirm current multi-seller consent requirements with counsel before scaling a shared lead form.

Sources: Eleventh Circuit, Insurance Marketing Coalition v. FCC (decided January 2025); Venable LLP, "Eleventh Circuit Overrules FCC's One-to-One Consent Rule"; Morrison Foerster, "Eleventh Circuit Vacates FCC's TCPA One-to-One Consent Rule."