Telemarketing-Prohibited Holidays

A telemarketing-prohibited holiday is a day on which a state forbids outbound telemarketing calls, on top of the usual daily curfew. These are separate from your normal Permitted calling hours and from any Calling curfew you already enforce. The catch is that the list is not national and not fixed: which holidays count depends on the state, and some dates shift from year to year because they fall on a moving weekday or follow a religious calendar. If you run outbound campaigns into states like Alabama, Louisiana, Rhode Island, Utah, Mississippi, or Pennsylvania, you need to know which days are off-limits before you dial.

Which holidays are restricted

Fixed-date holidays are the easy ones: New Year's Day, Independence Day on July 4, Veterans Day on November 11, and Christmas Day are restricted in several states. Alabama also restricts Juneteenth and Mrs. Rosa Parks Day, Utah restricts Pioneer Day on July 24, Pennsylvania restricts Flag Day on June 14, and Rhode Island restricts Victory Day in August and its own Independence Day in May. The harder ones move: Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Presidents' Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day, and Thanksgiving all fall on a different calendar date each year because they are tied to a specific weekday. Mardi Gras and Good Friday move with the religious calendar. Election Day is always a Tuesday, and Louisiana even restricts the day after Thanksgiving. Because the dates drift, you cannot set this once and forget it - you have to refresh your list every year and map each date to the specific states that observe it.

On the VICIdial side, this is a scheduling problem, not a DNC (do not call) problem. The numbers themselves are fine to call - you just cannot call them on that one day in that state. The clean way to handle it is the same mechanism you use for restrictive daily hours: the call time scheme attached to your Campaign. For the full picture of where holiday restrictions sit among federal and state rules, start with the VICIdial compliance overview, and for the day-of mechanics see how to block calling on a holiday.

How an operator decides each day

flowchart TD
  A[Calling day arrives] --> B{Holiday in target state?}
  B -- No --> C[Use normal call times]
  B -- Yes --> D{State restricts this holiday?}
  D -- No --> C
  D -- Yes --> E[Set state call time to 2400 2400]
  E --> F[Activate in campaign scheme]
  F --> G[No calls placed that day]
  G --> H[Revert next day]

The diagram shows the daily decision: confirm whether today is a restricted holiday in any state you are dialing, and if it is, switch that state to a no-calling window for the day before reverting. Because there is no per-state no-call-day scheduler built in, you drive this through the call time record for the affected state.

Keep the list current

Treat your holiday calendar as a yearly task. Pull the moving dates for the coming year, map them to the states you actually dial, and put a reminder on each one so nobody dials Louisiana on Good Friday by accident. A single missed holiday can turn into a string of prohibited calls across a whole shift, which is exactly the kind of pattern that draws a state complaint. Build the list once at the start of the year, share it with whoever manages the campaigns, and you remove the guesswork. Pairing this with solid DNC list hygiene keeps both your day-of and your number-level compliance tight, since the two problems are separate and a clean list does nothing to stop a call on a banned day.

VICIfast ships with the restrictive state call times already in place, so adding a holiday block is a small edit rather than a build. See pricing to get a dialer that comes compliant out of the box.