Calling curfew

A calling curfew is the rule that you may only place outbound calls inside a set window — for example after 8 a.m. and before 9 p.m. — and must stay quiet outside it. The detail people miss most often is that the clock is the recipient's local time, not yours. If your agents are in one time zone and the lead is three hours away, the curfew follows the lead, so a call that feels like a polite mid-morning ring to your team could be a 6 a.m. wake-up to the person on the other end.

This is the same idea as permitted calling hours, and different regulators set slightly different bands — the crtc in Canada and ofcom in the UK each have their own, and some U.S. states tighten the federal window further. The safe move is to configure the window per region and let the system, not a tired agent, decide whether each number is callable right now. Guessing in your head across zones is how curfew violations happen.

Enforcing it in VICIdial

VICIdial enforces curfews with call times, a named schedule of allowed hours that you attach to a campaign. It pairs that schedule with each lead's gmt offset, which it can derive from the area code or store directly on the record, so a number that is outside its own local window simply will not be dialed. Anything that lands after hours gets held back rather than called, and it becomes eligible again automatically once its local clock re-enters the window. Set the call-time schedule once per market, double-check the offsets in your data, and the dialer keeps you inside the curfew without anyone watching the clock. The one thing worth testing before a campaign goes live is a few leads near a time-zone edge, since a wrong offset on those records is the easy way a curfew slips. This is operational guidance, not legal advice.