A federal court in the Western District of Missouri has joined a growing number of courts concluding that SMS messages are not telephone calls under TCPA do-not-call rules.
The ruling, issued in Rush v. Selectquote Insurance, adds significant weight to what is becoming a new majority position on the disputed legal question.
The decision, bearing the citation 2026 WL 2495598, was handed down on 30 July 2026 and relied on the plain language of the statute.
At the heart of the ruling is Section 227(c)(5) of the TCPA, which grants a private right of action only in connection with “telephone calls.”
The court noted that Congress did not provide a definition for the term “telephone calls” anywhere within the TCPA itself.
That omission has left courts to interpret the phrase based on its ordinary meaning, a task that has produced increasingly consistent results favouring defendants in SMS-related disputes.
In reaching its conclusion, the court looked to historical context, noting that in 1991 “a telephone was ‘an instrument for reproducing sounds at a distance.'”
That framing, drawn from Steidinger v. Blackstone Medical, anchors the statutory language in a world that predates modern text messaging by years.
The implication is that Congress, when it wrote the TCPA, was legislating with voice communication in mind rather than text-based digital messaging.
For businesses that use SMS as a marketing and communications channel, the ruling offers a meaningful, if not yet definitive, degree of legal protection from certain TCPA claims.
However, the decision does not insulate companies entirely, as other provisions of the TCPA governing automated calls and consent requirements remain fully in force and unaffected by this line of reasoning.
The case is part of a broader judicial trend that legal commentators have described as a shifting landscape for TCPA litigation, particularly as courts grapple with applying decades-old statutory language to contemporary communications technology.
Companies and legal practitioners operating in the telemarketing and consumer communications space will be watching closely to see whether appellate courts affirm or challenge this emerging majority position.