The Federal Trade Commission published a final rule on August 26, 2026 raising National Do Not Call Registry access fees to $85 per area code and $23,425 for nationwide coverage, effective October 1, 2026, after a 3.5 percent move in the consumer price index crossed the statutory trigger.

The increase is small in absolute terms and mechanical in origin. Neither fact makes it uninteresting. The rule, filed on August 25 and published the following day under document number 2026-17428 at 91 FR 54947, amends section 310.8 of the Telemarketing Sales Rule by striking four dollar figures and inserting four others. That is the entire operative text. Everything else in the document explains why the Commission had no discretion in the matter.

What the rule changes

Three numbers move. The annual fee for access to Registry data for a single area code rises from $82 to $85. The maximum charged to any single entity for accessing area codes of data rises from $22,626 to $23,425. Entities adding area codes during the second six months of an annual subscription period will pay $43 per additional code, up from $41.

The amendments are expressed in the Federal Register as pure substitution. In paragraph (c) of section 310.8, "$82" is removed and "$85" inserted, and "$22,626" is removed and "$23,425" inserted. In paragraph (d), "$82" becomes "$85" and "$41" becomes "$43". Nothing else in part 310 is touched. According to the Commission, the amendments pertain only to the fee provision and will not establish or alter any record keeping, reporting, or third-party disclosure requirements elsewhere in the rule.

The revised fees take effect on October 1, 2026, the first day of federal fiscal year 2027. Joel Christie, Acting Secretary, signed the notice by direction of the Commission. The staff contact listed is Ami Joy Dziekan of the Bureau of Consumer Protection.

Access is not uniformly priced. According to the FTC, the first five area codes are free to download, and organisations that are exempt from the Do Not Call rules, including some charities and political callers, may obtain the entire list at no charge. Telemarketers must subscribe each year. The vote authorising publication of the Federal Register notice was 2-0.

The statutory formula, and why the Commission had no choice

The fee schedule is not set by the Commission's judgment about what Registry access is worth. It is set by the Do-Not-Call Registry Fee Extension Act of 2007, Public Law 110-188, 122 Stat. 635, codified at 15 U.S.C. 6152. That statute fixed base amounts for fiscal year 2009 and then indexed them.

The fiscal 2009 baseline was $54 per area code for a full year, $27 per area code during the second six months of a subscription period, and $14,850 as the maximum any single entity could be charged. Each subsequent year, those base amounts are multiplied by the percentage by which the average monthly consumer price index for all urban consumers, published by the Department of Labor, for the most recently ended 12-month period ending on June 30 exceeds the index for the 12-month period ending June 30, 2008. Results are rounded to the nearest dollar. If the index has moved less than one percent since the last increase, no increase occurs.

The determination runs in two steps, and the Commission set both out explicitly. First, it measured the change in the index since the previous increase. There was an increase for fiscal year 2026, so the comparison was to last year, and the change was 3.5 percent. Because that exceeds the one percent floor, fees change for fiscal year 2027.

Second, it applied the cumulative index change to the 2009 base. The average value of the index from July 1, 2007 to June 30, 2008 was 211.702. The average from July 1, 2025 to June 30, 2026 was 333.952. The Commission describes that as an increase of 57.75 percent.

Where the arithmetic lands

Applying that ratio to $54 produces $85.18, which rounds to $85. The half-year figure comes out at $42.59, which rounds to $43. The maximum, the Commission states, is $23,425.32, rounded to $23,425.

There is a small inconsistency inside those figures worth noting, because it shows which number the agency actually calculated from. The two index averages give a ratio of 1.5774627, an increase of 57.7463 percent rather than 57.75 percent. Multiplying $14,850 by the rounded 57.75 percent yields $23,425.88, not the $23,425.32 stated in the document. The unrounded ratio produces $23,425.32 exactly. The published percentage is therefore a display figure, and the underlying computation ran to more decimal places than the text shows. The final dollar amounts are unaffected.

Rounding does produce one substantive change. At the 2009 base, the half-year fee was exactly half the annual fee, $27 against $54. That parity survived into fiscal 2026, where $41 sat against $82. It does not survive fiscal 2027. Rounding $85.18 down to $85 while rounding $42.59 up to $43 puts the half-year rate at 50.6 percent of the annual rate. An entity that expands its calling footprint mid-subscription now pays a marginally worse rate per code than one that bought the same coverage in October.

A second piece of arithmetic sits inside the pairing of the per-code fee and the cap. At $85 per area code, the $23,425 ceiling binds at 276 chargeable area codes: 275 would cost $23,375, and 276 would cost $23,460 were the cap not there. The effective rate at or above that threshold is $84.87 per code. The same threshold applied in fiscal 2026, when 276 codes at $82 would have reached $22,632 against a $22,626 cap. The cap therefore continues to function as a nationwide flat rate rather than a per-unit discount schedule, and the point at which it engages has not moved.

No comment period, and the reason given

The rule was issued as a final rule without notice and comment. Under the Administrative Procedure Act at 5 U.S.C. 553(b), an agency may waive those requirements on a finding of good cause that they are "impracticable, unnecessary, or contrary to the public interest". The Commission made that finding, describing the amendments as "merely technical in nature" because the fee adjustments are mandated by statute. Having reached that conclusion, it also determined that the Regulatory Flexibility Act analysis requirements at 5 U.S.C. 603 and 604 do not apply.

Under the Paperwork Reduction Act, the Office of Management and Budget has approved the information collection requirements in the Telemarketing Sales Rule under control number 3084-0169. The Commission notes that the fee amendments do not disturb that approval.

The procedural posture is worth registering precisely because it is unremarkable. Fee indexation of this kind is one of the few areas of United States advertising regulation that moves on a fixed annual schedule with no discretionary element and no litigation risk. Almost nothing else on the compliance calendar behaves that way.

Who actually pays

The costs sit entirely on the calling side. According to the FTC, all telemarketers calling consumers in the United States are required to download the numbers on the Registry to ensure they do not call people who have registered their phone numbers.

That obligation makes the fee a fixed cost of operating a telephone acquisition channel in a given geography rather than a variable cost tied to call volume. A regional operator working within five area codes pays nothing, because the first five are free. One working across twelve pays for seven, or $595 in fiscal 2027 against $574 in fiscal 2026. A national outbound operation hitting the ceiling pays $23,425, an increase of $799 on the year. For a call centre with meaningful headcount, that is closer to a rounding error than a budget line. For a small operator adding two or three codes mid-subscription, the new $43 half-year rate is the more visible change.

The Registry is also the ancestor of a design pattern that later migrated to the browser. A centrally held list of people who have declined solicitation, maintained by a public body and made binding through enforcement, is structurally the same idea that Do Not Track attempted and failed to implement at the HTTP layer, and that Global Privacy Control has implemented with statutory backing in several states. The difference is funding. The telephone version charges the party that must respect the signal, which produces an annual Federal Register notice and a stable revenue stream. The web versions charge nobody, and compliance has been correspondingly uneven.

October 1 is getting crowded for phone-based acquisition

The fee change lands on the same day as a separate cost increase for anyone buying leads by telephone. Google set October 1, 2026 as the date when unanswered calls start counting as billable leads in Local Services Ads, provided the caller stays on the line past a 20 second threshold, with follow-up calls after an unqualified first contact also becoming chargeable. That notice arrived in advertiser inboxes on August 24 and surfaced publicly on August 25, one day before the FTC published its fee rule.

The two changes are unconnected in origin and land on partly overlapping populations. Home services advertisers buying Local Services leads are generally receiving inbound calls rather than placing outbound ones, so the Do Not Call obligation does not attach in the same way. But the categories overlap at the operational level: the same firms often run both inbound lead purchase and outbound follow-up, and the same October 1 date now moves both the cost of buying a call and the cost of holding the right to place one.

Measurement of those calls has been shifting independently. Google replaced call duration with AI analysis of call recordings as the primary conversion signal in April 2026, with recording enabled by default for most accounts, and surfaced the resulting call reports inside phone conversion actions on August 7, 2026. Whether a call counts as a conversion, whether it counts as a chargeable lead, and whether the number was legal to dial in the first place are now three separate determinations made by three different systems on the same telephone call.

The regulatory backdrop

The legal ground under outbound calling has been moving in a way the fee schedule does not reflect. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held on February 25, 2026 that the Telephone Consumer Protection Act requires only prior express consent, oral or written, for pre-recorded and auto-dialled calls to wireless numbers, a reading that sits against the Federal Communications Commission's written-consent regulation for telemarketing robocalls. That ruling governs consent. The Registry governs a separate obligation, the duty not to call numbers on the list at all, which does not turn on consent format.

The Commission that approved this fee notice 2-0 is the same two-member body that has been issuing enforcement policy statements at pace. It approved a personalized pricing enforcement policy statement 2-0 on August 19, 2026, one week before the fee rule. It closed the Kochava location data case with a stipulated order in May 2026, also 2-0, after nearly four years of litigation. Its 2026-2030 strategic plan, published April 3, 2026, names deceptive advertising and data collection among its enforcement priorities. Set against that, a $3 fee adjustment is the quietest thing the agency will publish this month.

Why it matters for the marketing community

Three practical points sit in the document.

The first is the shape of the subscription itself. The rule sets fees for fiscal year 2027 and takes effect on October 1, 2026, but the documents describe an annual subscription period belonging to the subscriber, with a distinct fee for area codes added during its second six months. Those two clocks are not the same clock, and the fee schedule assumes they can diverge.

The second is the half-year asymmetry. The $43 rate for area codes added during the second six months of a subscription is now marginally more than half the annual rate for the first time in this series. Geographic expansion mid-subscription carries a slightly worse unit economics profile than it did in fiscal 2026. The gap is 41 cents per code, which matters only at scale, but it is a directional change rather than a rounding artefact of a single year.

The third is the indexation mechanism itself. The one percent floor means fees can stay flat for multiple years when inflation is low, then move in consecutive steps when it is not. The $3 increase for fiscal 2027 follows a $2 increase for fiscal 2026. Any forecast of this line item over a multi-year horizon is a forecast of the consumer price index, not of agency policy, and the Commission has no authority to smooth it.

None of this changes what the Registry does. It remains a list of telephone numbers belonging to people who have said they do not want sales calls, and the fee is the price of the data needed to honour that. The document raising the price runs to roughly a page, contains no discretionary finding, and was signed the day before it published.

Timeline

Summary

Who: The Federal Trade Commission, acting through its Bureau of Consumer Protection, and the telemarketers, sellers and service providers required to subscribe to the National Do Not Call Registry. Joel Christie, Acting Secretary, signed the notice. Ami Joy Dziekan is the listed staff contact.

What: A final rule amending section 310.8 of the Telemarketing Sales Rule, raising the annual Registry access fee from $82 to $85 per area code, the maximum charge to any single entity from $22,626 to $23,425, and the second-half-year additional area code fee from $41 to $43. The first five area codes remain free, and exempt organisations including some charities and political callers may obtain the full list at no charge.

When: Filed August 25, 2026 and published August 26, 2026 as document 2026-17428 at 91 FR 54947. The revised fees take effect October 1, 2026, the start of federal fiscal year 2027.

Where: The United States, under 16 CFR part 310 and the Do-Not-Call Registry Fee Extension Act of 2007 at 15 U.S.C. 6152.

Why: The statute requires indexation to the consumer price index for all urban consumers. The index rose 3.5 percent since the previous increase, above the one percent threshold that would have held fees flat, and stands 57.75 percent above the June 2008 baseline. The Commission issued the rule without notice and comment on a good cause finding under 5 U.S.C. 553(b), describing the amendments as merely technical. The vote was 2-0.