Defenses / Reassigned numbers

Reassigned numbers: when the consent was real but the number changed hands

Updated 2026-11-035 minute read

A customer gives you a cell number and consents to texts. A year later they change carriers, the number goes back into the pool, and someone else gets it. Your system texts the new holder, who never heard of you. The consent was real. It belonged to someone else. The law treats this as a call without consent, and the only clean answer to it is a database check you made before you called.

Why prior consent does not carry over

Courts read the "called party" in § 227(b) as the current subscriber or customary user of the number, not the person the caller meant to reach. Consent is given by a person. When the number is reassigned, the person who consented is no longer on the other end, and the new holder has consented to nothing. Good faith does not change that; the statute does not ask whether you knew.

An earlier approach that allowed one free call to a reassigned number was struck down by the D.C. Circuit in ACA International v. FCC (2018). What replaced it is the database.

The Reassigned Numbers Database

The FCC's Reassigned Numbers Database has been in operation since 2021. Carriers report numbers that are permanently disconnected, and a caller can query a number together with a date (the date of consent, or the last date the caller confirmed the number belonged to the consenting person). The database answers yes, no, or no data: whether the number has been disconnected, and so potentially reassigned, since that date.

The safe harbor

Under 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200(m), a caller that would otherwise be liable for a call to a reassigned number is shielded if it can show that it checked the most recent update of the database before the call, using the date of consent, and the database reported that the number had not been disconnected. Three things follow.

• Only a "no" result protects you. A "yes" means do not call. "No data" gives no safe harbor.
• The query has to be against the current version of the database, and before the call.
• You still need the original consent. The safe harbor covers the reassignment; it does not create consent that never existed. What that record has to contain is set out under consent as a TCPA defense.

Without the database

If you never queried, there is no safe harbor, and the defense becomes a question of mitigation rather than liability: how quickly you flagged wrong-number responses, whether the dialer suppressed the number after the first "wrong number", and whether the calls in the letter came before or after that. Those facts can reduce the willfulness argument. They do not remove the call.

In practice

For each listed number, find the consent date, the call dates, and any database query between them. If the query exists and returned "no", the safe harbor applies to the calls after it. If there was no query, check whether the number appears in your wrong-number or opt-out logs and when. Then set up the querying process so the next campaign has the record. The database is the only thing that converts a reassigned-number call from a violation into a defended call. A new holder who sues is tested on whether this plaintiff can bring this claim at all.