TCPA Statutory Damages
$500 per text, $1,500 if willful, no injury requirement, no cap. The math is the deterrent and the plaintiff bar's payroll.
Statutory damages are what make the TCPA unique among consumer statutes: a plaintiff need not show any injury beyond receiving the message. Each unlawful text is $500; willful or knowing violations support up to $1,500 each.
"Willful" does not require malice — courts have found it satisfied where the sender knew it was sending texts and knew or should have known consent was absent, which describes most list-buying and post-STOP scenarios.
Damages stack per message, not per campaign or per person. Ten texts to one wrongly included number is $5,000-$15,000; the same defect across a 50,000-number segment is the class action. There is no good-faith cap, which is why prevention (consent capture and suppression discipline) is the only economical defense.
Frequently asked questions
Related glossary terms
A TCPA class action aggregates statutory claims — $500-$1,500 per unlawful text — across everyone similarly texted, turning a single campaign defect into seven- or eight-figure exposure.
The Telephone Consumer Protection Act is a US federal law (47 U.S.C. § 227) that restricts marketing calls and texts to mobile phones, with statutory damages of $500–$1,500 per violation.
Consent proof is the evidentiary record that a recipient explicitly opted in to SMS — typically a timestamped, IP-logged, hash-locked record of what the user saw and when they consented.