Texas put your text messages inside its telemarketing law. The exemption has a clock on it.

If you text customers to drum up work in Texas, the law that governs that changed on 1 September 2025, and it did not make the news in any trade publication we have seen.

None of what follows is legal advice. It is a description of what the statute now says, and whether it reaches your business is a question for a lawyer rather than for us.

What changed

Senate Bill 140 amended the definition of a telephone solicitation. It used to mean a telephone call. It now reads as a call or other transmission, including a transmission of a text or graphic message or of an image, initiated by a seller or salesperson.

So a promotional text is a telephone solicitation in Texas. So is one carrying a picture.

The bill also touched the private-action provisions, adding that a prior recovery does not limit recovery in a later proceeding, which is the part that makes this more than a paperwork question.

What registration involves

Texas requires sellers making telephone solicitations to register unless an exemption applies, and the Secretary of State is blunt about whose job that determination is: it is the seller's responsibility to decide whether the seller should register.

Registration currently carries a $200 filing fee. There is also a $10,000 security, issued in favour of the State for the benefit of anyone injured by the seller's breach of an agreement entered into during a telephone solicitation.

The exemption most local businesses will reach for

Chapter 302 carries a list of exemptions, and section 302.058 is the one that fits an established local business.

It exempts soliciting a contract for the maintenance or repair of something the customer previously bought from you. It also exempts soliciting a former or current customer, where the business has operated under the same business name for at least two years.

Read that second condition twice, because it is the part with a clock on it.

A business that rebranded eighteen months ago has not been operating under the same name for two years. Neither has one that changed its legal entity, or dropped a founder's surname from the trading name, or moved from a personal name to a company one. That is a live question for anybody who has changed their name recently, and it is not the kind of detail a marketing platform is going to ask you about before it sends.

The other exemptions exist too

The chapter also exempts persons regulated under other law, media subscription and certain merchandise sales, educational and nonprofit organisations, certain commercial sales, food sales, certain sales presentations and established retail locations, service providers acting for exempt persons, and isolated telephone solicitations.

Whether any of those covers a particular business is exactly the sort of question that looks obvious and is not. Take it to counsel rather than to a blog, including this one.

A note about checking this yourself

Worth passing on, because it nearly caught us. A free statute mirror served the old definition, the one that says a telephone call and stops there, which flatly contradicted what the amendment did.

The bill text settled it. If you go looking at this yourself, check the enrolled bill and its effective date rather than trusting a statute site to be current, because free mirrors lag amendments and a stale definition reads exactly like a reassuring one.

How this sits with the federal side

This is a state registration question layered on top of the federal and carrier requirements that already govern business texting, which is a separate stack with its own consent rules and its own paperwork. That side is covered here, and satisfying one has never meant satisfying the other.

The practical read for a Houston business: if you are texting your own customers, under a name you have traded under for years, about work related to what they bought, you are in the most comfortable position the statute offers. If any of those three things is not true, that is worth an hour of a lawyer's time before the next campaign rather than after it.

If you want help working out what your automations are actually sending, and to whom, book a strategy call. We can map the traffic; the legal read belongs with someone qualified to give it.