Tennessee Telemarketing Law for Insurance Agents (2026)

Yes, it’s still legal to call an insurance lead in Tennessee. What changed on July 1, 2026 is narrower than a calling-hours law like Oregon’s or Georgia’s, but it lands squarely on any agency running automated or AI-voice outbound at real volume: Tennessee Code Annotated Section 65-4-411, created by House Bill 2408 (Public Chapter 1029), caps a person or entity at 10,000 “telephone solicitations” a month if those calls use an automated telephone dialing system to deliver an artificial or prerecorded voice message to a Tennessee residential subscriber. Cross 500 a month, and starting October 1, 2026, you owe the Tennessee Public Utility Commission a volume report twice a year. This article walks through exactly what the statute says, why it’s a live question whether an AI voice agent counts the same way a decades-old prerecorded robocall does, what a violation costs, who’s actually close to the 10,000 line, and how an agency calling Tennessee leads stays inside it.

What Tennessee House Bill 2408 Actually Says

House Bill 2408, sponsored by Representative Charlie Baum with a Senate companion from Senator White, started as a narrow reporting bill and was rewritten in committee. The version that actually passed is House Amendment 0854, adopted by the House Commerce Committee, which struck the original bill text entirely and substituted new language adding a section to Tennessee Code Annotated, Title 65, Chapter 4, Part 4. That new section, codified as TCA Section 65-4-411, is what agencies calling Tennessee leads need to read.

The statutory text, read directly from the enacted amendment, breaks into three parts. First, a recordkeeping duty: “A person or entity that makes telephone solicitations using an automated telephone dialing system to deliver artificial or prerecorded voice messages to residential subscribers in this state shall maintain a record of the number of such telephone solicitations made each month.” That duty alone, keeping your own count, isn’t tied to any threshold. Every entity making these kinds of calls into Tennessee has to track volume starting July 1, 2026, whether or not it ever has to show the number to anyone.

Second, a reporting duty layered on top, but only above a threshold: “Beginning October 1, 2026, a person or entity that makes no less than five hundred (500) telephone solicitations per month… shall provide copies of the records… to the commission no less than once every six (6) months.” The same subsection adds that the commission or the state attorney general can also demand those records on request at any time, independent of the twice-yearly schedule.

Third, and separately from the reporting duty, a hard ceiling that applies no matter what: “a person or entity shall not make more than ten thousand (10,000) telephone solicitations per month using an automated telephone dialing system to deliver artificial or prerecorded voice messages to residential subscribers in this state.” That line is written as its own standalone prohibition, not as a consequence of failing to report. An entity that dutifully reports every six months is still in violation the moment its monthly count crosses 10,000.

Does This Reach AI Voice Agents, or Just Old-School Robocalls?

This is the question that actually matters if your outbound is a managed AI caller rather than a prerecorded voicemail blast, and Tennessee’s legislature didn’t answer it directly. The statute borrows the exact phrase federal law has used since 1991: “artificial or prerecorded voice.” It doesn’t carve out real-time, interactive AI speech as something different from a static recording.

Federal law has already settled this question for the TCPA itself, and the answer points one direction. On February 2, 2024, the FCC adopted a Declaratory Ruling, released February 8, 2024 as FCC 24-17, in CG Docket No. 23-362. The ruling states plainly: “we confirm that the TCPA’s restrictions on the use of ‘artificial or prerecorded voice’ encompass current AI technologies that resemble human voices and/or generate call content using a prerecorded voice.” The Commission’s reasoning wasn’t narrow. It held that AI-generated speech counts as “artificial” specifically “because a person is not speaking them,” and it expressly rejected the idea that a live-sounding, interactive AI caller escapes the rule the way a human agent would: the ruling states the TCPA “does not allow for any carve out of technologies that purport to provide the equivalent of a live agent.”

None of this has been tested against Tennessee’s statute specifically in any court. No Tennessee appellate decision, and no TPUC enforcement action, has yet addressed whether a live, conversational AI voice agent counts as delivering an “artificial… voice message” under Section 65-4-411. What exists is a federal regulator’s unanimous ruling, under materially identical statutory language, holding that it does. An agency running AI voice calls into Tennessee that assumes this statute only reaches decades-old recorded robocalls is betting against the direction every relevant authority has pointed so far.

What a Violation Actually Costs

The enacted text is specific about enforcement, and it splits into two separate tracks. Failing to report, or failing to keep the underlying records, is a violation enforced by the Tennessee Public Utility Commission “under the Do Not Call Act,” per the commission’s own public notice. Exceeding the 10,000-call cap is different: the statute states that “a violation of subsection (b) is an unfair or deceptive act or practice affecting trade or commerce for purposes of the Tennessee Consumer Protection Act of 1977,” and that “a court that finds that a person or entity violated subsection (b) shall impose a civil penalty of no less than one thousand dollars ($1,000) per violation.” That’s enforced by the Tennessee Attorney General and Reporter, not the commission.

The $1,000 figure is written as a floor, not a ceiling, and the statute says a court “shall impose” it on a finding of violation, which leaves no discretion to award less. Do the arithmetic on exposure the same way a plaintiff’s attorney would: a single month that runs even modestly over the 10,000-call line, say 10,500 solicitations, isn’t obviously 500 separate violations at $1,000 each under the statute’s own text, since the enacted language doesn’t spell out whether each call over the line is a separate violation or the monthly breach itself is one. What the statute does make unambiguous is that the floor per finding is $1,000, that it stacks on top of whatever federal TCPA exposure already exists at $500 to $1,500 per violation under 47 U.S.C. Section 227, and that it’s enforced by a different office, the state attorney general, than federal TCPA claims typically are.

Who’s Actually Close to the 10,000-Call Line

Ten thousand calls a month sounds like a number only a large call center would hit. Run the math against a normal business month and it’s closer than it looks. Thirty days of calling averages out to about 333 automated solicitations a day to stay under the cap; across roughly 21 to 22 business days a month, that’s closer to 455 to 476 a day if weekends are off the table. An agency running one AI voice line that dials a few hundred Tennessee numbers a day, every business day, is operating in range of the ceiling, not comfortably below it.

Tennessee’s own insurance licensing numbers show why this isn’t a hypothetical limited to a handful of in-state call centers. The Tennessee Department of Commerce and Insurance reported 322,230 active licensed insurance producers as of February 2026, 51,852 of them Tennessee residents and 270,378 of them non-resident license holders based elsewhere but authorized to sell into the state. The statute’s cap and reporting duty apply based on where the call lands, “to residential subscribers in this state,” not where the licensee’s office sits. An agency in Georgia or Texas running an AI voice campaign against a purchased Tennessee lead list is exactly as exposed to the 10,000-call cap as a Nashville-based agency would be.

Tennessee’s New Law vs. the Federal TCPA

The two laws stack rather than substitute for each other. Clearing Tennessee’s 10,000-call cap says nothing about whether the underlying calls had the prior express consent the federal TCPA already requires for an artificial or prerecorded voice call. A campaign can be fully consented under federal law and still cross the Tennessee ceiling, or stay comfortably under 10,000 calls and still violate the TCPA on individual calls that lacked consent. Both obligations apply on the same call, independently.

Where Tennessee’s Law Doesn’t Reach

Be precise about the limits, because overstating a new law is as costly as missing one. TCA Section 65-4-411 is written around two specific technical elements: an automated telephone dialing system, and an artificial or prerecorded voice message. A licensed agent manually dialing a Tennessee lead from a spreadsheet, with a human voice on the line from the first word, isn’t making a call “using an automated telephone dialing system to deliver artificial or prerecorded voice messages.” That kind of call sits outside this particular statute’s cap and reporting duty entirely, even though it’s still bound by the federal TCPA’s own consent and Do Not Call rules, which don’t require an autodialer or a recorded voice to apply.

Text messages are the other clear gap. Unlike Oregon’s HB 3865, which explicitly pulled text messages into its telemarketing definition, nothing in HB 2408 as enacted extends Section 65-4-411’s recordkeeping duty, reporting threshold, or 10,000-call cap to SMS. A Tennessee-targeted automated text follow-up sequence isn’t counted against this statute’s numbers, though it remains subject to the federal TCPA’s separate text-message consent rules.

And the statute doesn’t say anything about AI disclosure as its own obligation. It regulates volume and recordkeeping for an “artificial or prerecorded voice,” not whether that voice has to identify itself as AI. A separate, state-by-state patchwork of AI disclosure rules, covered in our guide to AI voice disclosure laws, governs that question, and it isn’t answered by HB 2408 either way.

How Insurance Agents Calling Tennessee Leads Stay Compliant

None of this requires abandoning automated or AI-voice outbound into Tennessee. It requires knowing your actual monthly count and building the reporting habit before October 1, 2026 makes it mandatory.

1. Start counting automated and AI-voice calls to Tennessee numbers now, not in October. The recordkeeping duty under TCA Section 65-4-411(a)(1) took effect July 1, 2026. Waiting until the reporting threshold activates to start tracking means guessing at months you already should have on record.
2. Segment Tennessee call volume from your national totals. The cap and reporting duty are specific to calls delivered to Tennessee residential subscribers. A platform or CRM that only reports total national dial counts can’t tell you whether your Tennessee-specific volume is approaching 500 or 10,000.
3. Set an internal alert well below 10,000, not at it. A single busy week of AI-voice outbound can move a monthly count faster than a manual spreadsheet gets updated. An alert at 8,000 or 8,500 gives an agency room to throttle before crossing into cap-violation territory.
4. Treat out-of-state status as no protection. With 270,378 non-resident producer licenses active in Tennessee against 51,852 resident ones, most agencies legally selling there are based elsewhere. The statute follows the call to where it lands, not where the dialer sits.
5. Don’t assume a live-sounding AI voice is exempt because it isn’t a static recording. The FCC’s own February 2024 ruling rejected that exact argument under the federal TCPA’s identical “artificial… voice” language. Build your Tennessee compliance plan as if Section 65-4-411 reaches AI voice calls, not as if it clearly doesn’t.
6. Prepare for the first filing now. The first semiannual report to the Tennessee Public Utility Commission is due April 1, 2027. An agency that’s been tracking volume since July 2026 has a clean record to submit; one that starts counting in March 2027 doesn’t.
7. Remember texts and manual dials sit outside this specific statute, not outside compliance generally. Keeping an SMS sequence or a live-dialed list under 10,000 a month doesn’t matter for this law, but both still carry their own federal TCPA and Do Not Call obligations.

How TheAffordableAI Handles This

None of this replaces knowing your own monthly Tennessee call count or deciding whether your agency is closer to 500 or 10,000. A platform can surface the number; it can’t decide for you whether to throttle, split volume across more licensed numbers, or file the report. If you want to hear what an actual AI call and disclosure sounds like before deciding anything, there’s a live demo call on the homepage. You can also build your own volume-tracking spreadsheet against a compliant dialer; plenty of agencies do, and it’s worth pricing against a managed platform on the pricing page either way.

What You Actually Get

Concretely, knowing the real thresholds, 500 to trigger reporting, 10,000 as a hard ceiling, both counted against Tennessee-specific volume, turns a rule an agency could easily blow past by accident into something a dialer and a CRM field can watch for. It means an AI-voice campaign running a few hundred calls a day into Tennessee gets a volume alert before it crosses into cap-violation territory, not after a $1,000-per-violation letter arrives. It means the first TPUC filing, due April 1, 2027, has eight months of clean records behind it instead of a scramble in March.

What it doesn’t do is answer every open legal question. Whether an interactive AI voice agent counts as an “artificial… voice message” under Tennessee’s specific statute hasn’t been tested in a Tennessee court. This article reflects a review of the cited statute, regulatory notice, and FCC ruling as of the publish date; it’s general information, not legal advice for your specific agency. Talk to counsel licensed in Tennessee before finalizing a compliance policy built around these numbers.

Tennessee’s robocall law isn’t a calling-hours rule and it isn’t a ban. It’s a number, 10,000 automated voice calls a month into the state, with a reporting duty that kicks in at 500, and it reaches further than a dusty prerecorded-voicemail statute might suggest, straight into AI voice calling, on the strength of the FCC’s own reading of nearly identical federal language. An agency running AI-voice outbound into Tennessee doesn’t need to stop. It needs an actual count.