What Local Calling Times Are

A local calling time is the window of hours during which you are legally allowed to place a telemarketing call to a consumer. The key word is local - the window is measured against the time zone where the person being called lives, not where your call center or dialer sits. The federal floor is 8am to 9pm local, and a tighter end of that window enforced by your campaign is often called a Calling curfew. Get this wrong and you can dial someone at 8:30am their time while it feels like a reasonable mid-morning to you - a clear violation. The set of hours you actually permit for a campaign are its Permitted calling hours, and in VICIdial they live in a Call times record.

Why it is the consumer's local time, not yours

The whole point of the rule is to protect the person receiving the call from being disturbed at an unreasonable hour. That only works if the clock that matters is theirs. A dialer in Texas calling a list spread across the country has to know that 9pm Eastern is already 6pm Pacific - one of those calls is illegal and the other is fine, at the same instant. VICIdial figures this out from each lead's phone number and address data. It derives the consumer's time zone, which VICIdial tracks as a GMT offset (lead) on the lead, then compares the current local time at that offset against the campaign's call time window before it will hand the record to the dialer.

If a lead's local time is outside the window, the system simply does not dial it - it waits until the window opens or moves on. That means the timing rule is enforced continuously, on every record, with no agent having to think about it. For the broader compliance picture this sits inside, see the VICIdial compliance overview. Many states are stricter than the federal floor, and those state-specific windows are covered in the state-specific calling time restrictions.

How the window decision is made

flowchart LR
  A[Lead phone and zip] --> B[Derive GMT offset]
  B --> C[Compute consumer local time]
  C --> D{Inside call window}
  D -- Yes --> E[Hand lead to dialer]
  D -- No --> F[Hold lead until window opens]

The flow shows the core idea: take the lead, work out the consumer's local time from their GMT offset, then compare it against the permitted window. Only records inside the window get dialed; everything else is held until the clock catches up. This is automatic - you define the window once and the dialer applies it to every call.

You should not have to babysit calling hours by hand. VICIfast ships with sensible call time defaults and the built-in state windows already available - see pricing to see what is included.