Telemarketing Record Keeping: Now Five Years

Under the federal Telemarketing Sales Rule, telemarketing record keeping requirements now run five years, up from two. The FTC's amendments, published in the Federal Register on April 16, 2024, expanded 16 CFR 310.5(a) to ten named record categories, from call detail records to consent copies to your contracts with dialer and voice vendors, and most must be kept five years from the date the record is made. If you run a dealership BDC, a law firm intake desk, or a real estate team that dials leads out of Las Vegas, that is the schedule you are on today.

Plenty of owners still assume the old two year window, or assume the rule is a call center problem. Neither holds up. Below is a ten row retention schedule you can drop into your operations doc, two worked examples for shops of different sizes, and a plain account of where the rule does not reach. This is general information, not legal advice; your attorney decides how it applies to your calls.

The 2024 requirements raised retention from two years to five and named ten records

The final rule is the FTC's Telemarketing Sales Rule amendments at 89 FR 26760, Federal Register Volume 89, Number 74, pages 26760 through 26786. It took effect May 16, 2024. Compliance with the amended 16 CFR 310.5(a)(2) was not required until October 15, 2024, so as of this month every date in the rulemaking has been live for two years.

Three changes matter to an owner. Retention went from two years to five. The list of what counts as a record got longer and more specific, down to the fields a call detail record has to hold. And the rule pulled your vendor contracts into the record set, which almost nobody had filed as a compliance document before.

The jump is bigger than it sounds. Two years is 24 months; five years is 60. Divide 60 by 24 and you get 2.5, so any record that piles up daily, like a call log, now means roughly two and a half times the data you have to keep, search, and produce on request. The storage is cheap. Finding the right row three years from now, after a vendor change, is the part that breaks.

Ten record categories and the date each one can be deleted

The first four columns follow the rule as published at 89 FR 26760. The last two are our operating suggestion for a typical Las Vegas small business stack, not something the rule assigns; swap in your own systems and names.

Record category	Data fields required	Retention clock start	Keep until	Where it lives in a typical phone or CRM stack	Who owns it
Advertising materials and prerecorded messages	Each substantially different ad, each unique prerecorded message	Last day in use	5 years after last use	Marketing drive, dialer audio library, voice agent scripts	Marketing lead
Call detail records	Calling number, called number, time, date, duration, disposition	Record made	5 years after creation	Carrier or dialer call logs, CRM activity timeline	BDC or intake manager
Prize recipient records	Name, telephone number, address	Record made	5 years after creation	Giveaway sheet, CRM campaign field	Marketing lead
Customer transaction records	Name, telephone number, address, purchase details	Record made	5 years after creation	DMS, case management, POS, CRM deal record	Sales manager
Established business relationship records	Documentation of the relationship you call on	Record made	5 years after creation	CRM contact and purchase history	Operations manager
Previous donor records	Donor information tied to the specific charity	Record made	5 years after creation	Donor CRM, charitable callers only	Development lead
Consent records	Name, telephone number, copy of the authorization	Record made	5 years after creation	Web form logs, e-sign platform, CRM consent field	Compliance owner
Service provider contracts	Contracts with voice providers, autodialer vendors, technology platforms	Last day in use	5 years after last use	Email, vendor portals, accounting files	Owner or GM
Entity specific do not call list	People who asked you not to call	Record made	5 years after creation	Dialer suppression list, CRM flag	Operations manager
National Do Not Call compliance records	Records of compliance with the FTC Registry	Record made	5 years after creation	Registry download history, dialer scrub reports	Compliance owner

Your vendor is a record. The contract with whoever carries your calls, runs your dialer, or hosts your AI voice agent is now something you must be able to produce. Its clock does not start when you sign. It starts when you stop using the vendor. Sign a dialer contract in 2026, run it until 2029, and you keep it until 2034. Many of these agreements are clickwrap terms inside a vendor portal that disappears when the account closes, so download a PDF of the terms in force before you cancel.

Most of the risk in this table is not a missing policy. It is a record that exists today inside a tool nobody will have a login to in 2029.

A consent record can expire while you are still calling on it

The rule's language is precise: records are kept "five years from the date the record is made," except advertising materials and service provider contracts, which run "five years from the date records under those sections are no longer in use." That difference creates a gap owners should close on purpose.

Walk through it. A buyer fills out a test drive form on March 1, 2026 and checks the consent box. The consent record is made that day, so the five year clock lets you delete it on March 1, 2031. Now assume the lead stays in your nurture list and your BDC calls them in 2032 on that same consent. Every 2032 call detail record is kept until 2037, but the record proving you had permission to make those calls is already gone.

Our posture, which goes beyond what the rule requires: keep each consent record for as long as you rely on it, plus five years. Treat it the way the rule treats ads and contracts. The cost of logging is near zero, and when a consent dispute lands, a missing consent record is the entire defense.

Ad materials are easy to under keep for the opposite reason. A prerecorded holiday message that runs from November 2026 through January 2027 starts its clock in January 2027, so it lives until January 2032. The facts we rely on do not settle whether an AI voice agent's script counts as a prerecorded message, so we archive every production version, dated. It is a few kilobytes and it answers the question "what did your system actually say."

A six agent dealership BDC carries over half a million call rows

Here is the arithmetic for a mid sized store. Assume a BDC of six agents, each making 70 outbound dials per working day, 22 working days a month. That is 6 times 70, or 420 dials a day. Times 22 is 9,240 a month, times 12 is 110,880 a year.

Under the old two year rule you held about 221,760 call detail records at steady state (110,880 times 2). Under five years you hold 554,400 (110,880 times 5). Each row carries six required fields, the calling number, called number, time, date, duration, and disposition, so that is 3,326,400 field values you have to keep intact. Assume roughly 1 KB per row with its metadata and the whole set is about 554 MB. That fits on a phone.

So size is not the problem. The problem is that the rows live in three places that change on different schedules. The dialer holds dispositions, the carrier holds the raw call log, and the CRM holds the consent and the deal. When the store switches dialers in 2027, the old dialer's logs have to be exported before the account closes, and the old dialer contract starts its own five year life that day.

The test we run with dealers is simple. Pick a phone number your BDC called last quarter and try to pull four things for it: the call detail row, the consent record, the do not call scrub that cleared it, and the vendor contract in force that day. If that takes a person and an afternoon across three logins, you have records but not a record keeping system. Stitching those into one export is ordinary back office automation work, not a new software purchase.

A three agent real estate team has a smaller pile and a bigger hole

Scale it down. Assume three agents making 40 dials a day each, 20 days a month. That is 120 dials a day, 2,400 a month, 28,800 a year, and 144,000 call detail records over five years. A spreadsheet could technically hold it.

The real risk at this size is personal phones. When agents dial leads from their own cell, the call detail record lives on their personal carrier account, the consent may live in a text thread, and none of it belongs to the team. When an agent leaves in year two, those records walk out the door with them.

The fix is cheap: route outbound through a business line or app that logs to a shared CRM, and capture consent through a form the team owns. Our business automation page shows the basic wiring. A small law firm doing intake follow up calls faces the same shape of problem, with case management standing in for the CRM. Only the row count changes; the five years does not scale with your size.

B2B calls and AI voices both picked up rules in 2024

The same rulemaking, 89 FR 26760, extended the ban on material misrepresentations and false or misleading statements to business to business telemarketing, applying Sections 310.3(a)(2) and 310.3(a)(4) to B2B calls that were previously outside that reach. It also added a definition of "previous donor," which matters if you call on behalf of a charity. A Las Vegas linen service calling restaurants, or a contractor calling property managers, should stop assuming consumer rules never touch them.

On the FCC side, the FCC's Declaratory Ruling FCC 24-17 on AI generated voices, adopted February 2, 2024 and released February 8, 2024 in CG Docket No. 23-362, confirmed that "the TCPA's restrictions on the use of artificial or prerecorded voice encompass current AI technologies that resemble human voices." That puts AI voice calls under 47 U.S.C. 227(b)(1)(A) and (B) and 47 CFR 64.1200.

In practice, a call using an AI generated or simulated voice needs the prior express consent of the called party, and prior express written consent when the call contains an advertisement or is telemarketing. Artificial voice messages must identify the caller and the responsible entity, and telemarketing calls must offer an opt out. Emergency purpose calls may be exempt.

Put the two agencies together and you get one operating rule: whatever consent standard applies to your call, the record proving it now has a five year life under the FTC rule. That includes an AI voice lane that calls back people who called you. If your missed call recovery flow ever shifts from returning a call into pitching an offer, log it exactly like an outbound lane.

Where this schedule does not fit your business

The Telemarketing Sales Rule does not reach every call a business makes. Coverage turns on whether the call is telemarketing as the rule defines it, and exemptions exist. A restaurant that only answers inbound reservation calls, or a law firm that only returns calls from people who asked for a consultation, may sit partly or fully outside it. We still recommend logging the ten categories because logging is close to free, but do not read this table as proof that your shop is covered.

This post also does not address Nevada state law, other retention rules such as tax or industry records that may run longer, or how records made before the October 2024 compliance date should be treated. The facts we relied on do not settle that transition, so ask counsel. The dial counts in both examples are our assumptions; change them and the row counts move, but the five years does not. This is general information, not legal advice.

Questions owners ask

How long do I have to keep telemarketing call records?

Under the amended Telemarketing Sales Rule published April 16, 2024, call detail records are kept five years from the date the record is made, up from two years. Each record must show the calling number, called number, time, date, duration, and disposition. Advertising materials and service provider contracts are different: their five years start when you stop using them, not when they were created.

Do I need to keep my dialer contract after I cancel it?

Yes. The 2024 amendments made contracts with service providers, including voice service providers, autodialer vendors, and technology platforms, a required record. The clock starts when the contract is no longer in use, so cancelling starts the five year period instead of ending your obligation. Save a PDF of the terms in force before you close the account, because vendor portals usually vanish with it.

Does the Telemarketing Sales Rule apply to B2B calls?

Partly, and more than it used to. The 2024 rulemaking extended the prohibition on material misrepresentations and false or misleading statements, Sections 310.3(a)(2) and 310.3(a)(4), to business to business telemarketing. Other parts of the rule may still treat B2B calls differently, and exemptions exist. If your outbound lane calls other businesses, keep the records anyway and ask counsel which sections reach you.

What to do this week

1. Copy the table above into your operations doc and fill in the last two columns for your own stack: one named system and one named person per row. Any row you cannot fill is your first gap.
2. Collect every service provider contract, your carrier, dialer, AI voice platform, and CRM, as a PDF into one folder, with the date you started and stopped using each one.
3. Check the log retention setting in your dialer, carrier portal, and CRM. Where it is shorter than five years, or unknown, set a recurring export, then run the one phone number test from the dealership example to prove you can pull a full record.

If you would rather have someone walk your call and consent records with you, the free 15-minute audit on our back office automation page is a good place to start.