One-to-One Consent Is Dead. The Problem It Was Meant to Fix Isn't.

For most of 2024, marketing leaders at home service platforms were told to prepare for a rule that would reshape lead buying. The FCC's one-to-one consent requirement was going to end the comparison-shopping model — the single form where a homeowner consents to contact from an unspecified list of partner sellers — and force consent to be given to one identified seller at a time.

A lot of operators quietly welcomed it. It promised to do something the market had not done on its own: make the homeowner on the other end of the call actually expect the call.

It never took effect.

What actually happened

The sequence, briefly:

• The FCC adopted the one-to-one consent rule in December 2023, requiring that prior express written consent be given to a single identified seller, with the call "logically and topically associated" with the website where consent was collected.
• Days before it was to take effect, the FCC postponed the effective date.
• On January 24, 2025, the Eleventh Circuit vacated the rule in Insurance Marketing Coalition v. FCC, holding that the agency had exceeded its statutory authority. The court's reasoning: to give prior express consent, a consumer need only clearly state, before the call, that he is willing to receive it. The FCC's one-to-one and topical-association requirements added conditions the statute did not contain.
• The FCC declined to appeal and formally removed the rule in September 2025.

The consent standard reverted to where it was before: prior express written consent, without the one-to-one constraint. The comparison-shopping lead model is intact and legal.

If you built a 2025 plan around the rule cleaning up your lead supply, that plan needs revisiting.

The reprieve that wasn't

Here is the part that surprised people who read the vacatur as a return to normal: litigation exposure went up sharply anyway.

The public filing data is unambiguous:

• In Q1 2025, 507 TCPA class actions were filed — a 112% year-over-year increase over the 239 filed in Q1 2024.
• September 2025 alone saw 224 TCPA class actions, against 79 in the same month a year earlier.
• Through April 2026, overall TCPA filings were up 26.8% year to date against a 2025 baseline that was already a record.
• Roughly 80% of TCPA suits are filed as class actions — a rate that dramatically exceeds other consumer protection statutes.

Statutory damages remain $500 per violation, rising to $1,500 per violation where a court finds the conduct knowing or willful. There is no cap.

Run that math against a plausible campaign. A class of 100,000 improperly contacted consumers — a volume a multi-state platform can generate in a single quarter — is $50M to $150M of exposure. For a PE-backed platform carrying acquisition debt, that is not a legal expense line. That is a capital structure event.

The regulatory constraint went away. The economic constraint got worse.

Why both things are true at once

The one-to-one rule would have shifted enforcement to the front of the transaction — a bright-line standard, defined by the agency, that a seller could design against and demonstrate compliance with.

Vacating it did not remove the underlying obligation. It removed the bright line. Prior express written consent is still required. What "prior express written consent" means in any given case is now resolved where it was resolved before: by a court, after the calls were made, on a record assembled by a plaintiff's firm.

That is a worse environment for buyers, not a better one, for three reasons.

The standard is less predictable. A rule you can read is easier to comply with than a standard you litigate. Compliance now depends on how a specific disclosure, on a specific page, on a specific date, reads to a specific judge.

The plaintiff's bar has industrialized. The filing volume above is not a response to worse conduct. It is a response to a mature, well-capitalized litigation practice with efficient case sourcing. Lead-generated calls are a primary target because the consent chain runs through a third party the defendant does not control.

The liability sits with the caller, not the source. This is the one that matters most and gets understood last. Your vendor collected the consent. Your company placed the call. You are the named defendant. Your recourse against the vendor is whatever your indemnification clause says — and if that clause is capped at fees paid, you have no meaningful recourse at all.

The rule that is still coming

One piece of the FCC's framework survived and is still on the calendar, though it has moved twice.

The consent revocation rules require honoring a consumer's revocation through any reasonable method. The portion requiring that a single revocation request cut off all future calls and texts from that caller — including on unrelated topics — was originally set for April 11, 2025, delayed one year to April 11, 2026, and then extended again by a Second Extension Order issued January 6, 2026. That provision now takes effect January 31, 2027.

For a multi-brand platform, the operational implication is specific and worth starting on now: a homeowner who revokes with your roofing brand may need to be suppressed across every brand and every campaign in the portfolio. If your brands run separate CRMs and separate suppression lists — which, after a few acquisitions, they do — that capability does not exist today and will take longer than you think to build.

What to do

Five things, in order of how much exposure they close.

1. Audit consent at the record level, not the vendor level. For any homeowner you contacted in the last 12 months, can you produce the exact disclosure language they saw, the timestamp, the IP address, and the originating URL — within 24 hours? If the answer requires emailing a vendor and waiting, you do not have a consent record. You have a vendor's assurance that one exists.

2. Read your indemnification clauses. Specifically, find the cap. An indemnity capped at trailing fees paid is not indemnification against a class action; it is a refund. A vendor's willingness to carry uncapped TCPA liability is the single most informative signal available about how confident they are in their own consent chain.

3. Treat inherited exposure as a diligence item. When you acquire a brand, you acquire its calling history and its consent chain. Marketing diligence in home services deals is frequently two pages and focused on spend. Add consent record retention and vendor indemnity to the checklist, pre-close, while it is still priceable.

4. Map your revocation architecture now. Before January 2027. Inventory where suppression lists live across brands, and what it would take to make a single revocation propagate across all of them. If the answer is "we would need a shared suppression service," that is a build with a lead time.

5. Reconsider what you are buying. A shared or comparison-shopping record is legal. It is also the record most likely to produce a homeowner who does not recall consenting to a call from your specific brand — which is where the complaint starts. The question is not whether the model is permitted. It is whether the pricing of that record reflects the tail risk it carries, and it generally does not.

The takeaway

The rule that was supposed to fix lead quality is gone. The reason people wanted it fixed has not changed, and the cost of getting it wrong has gone up every quarter since the rule was struck down.

Compliance in this category is no longer a question of following a regulation. It is a question of whether you can prove, record by record, that the person you called agreed to be called by you — and whether the partner who obtained that agreement will stand behind it when someone asks.

Sources

• Insurance Marketing Coalition v. FCC, Eleventh Circuit, January 24, 2025
• FCC final rule removing the one-to-one consent requirement, September 2025
• FCC Second Extension Order, January 6, 2026 — revocation provision effective January 31, 2027
• TCPA class action filing volumes: TCPAWorld and National Law Review monthly litigation trackers, 2025–2026
• Statutory damages: 47 U.S.C. § 227(b)(3)