Is it legal to text your employees?

1. Consent and the TCPA

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act is the law people have in mind when they ask this question. It restricts autodialed calls and texts to mobile numbers without prior express consent, and it sets a higher bar — prior express written consent — for messages whose purpose is marketing.

Work-related messages to your own employees are a different animal from marketing texts to strangers. An employee who gives you their number so you can reach them about shifts has done something meaningfully different from a consumer whose number was bought from a list. That said, there is no blanket “employer exemption” you can point at, and the analysis gets murkier the closer a message gets to promotion — an invitation to buy discounted company merchandise is not the same as “your shift moved to 4pm.”

The practical takeaway: collect consent and write it down. It costs almost nothing, it settles arguments about whether someone agreed, and it keeps you on solid ground if a message ever gets characterized as something other than purely informational.

2. Opt-outs are not optional

Separately from the law, the mobile carriers and the messaging providers that connect to them enforce their own rules on application-to-person messaging. STOP must work. HELP must work. This applies to your traffic whether or not the recipients are on your payroll, and ignoring it gets your number filtered or shut off — which means your closure text doesn’t arrive on the morning you most need it to.

Plan for what happens when someone opts out. They still need to know the store is closed. In practice that means a phone call, the posted schedule, or a coworker — and it means not treating the opt-out as insubordination, which is its own problem.

A practical checklist

• Ask before you add anyone. A one-time confirmation text — reply YES to receive shift and closure messages — creates a record and takes ten seconds.
• Say what they’re signing up for. Topics, rough frequency, and how to stop. Vague consent is weak consent.
• Identify yourself in the first message. An unrecognized number gets ignored, blocked, or reported as spam — which hurts your delivery to everyone else.
• Honor STOP immediately and permanently, and keep the record of it.
• Keep work texts about work.The moment you use the team list to promote something, you’re in a stricter category.
• Write down when a reply is expected— and make clear that non-urgent off-hours messages don’t require one.
• Keep records of consent and opt-outs. Screenshots in your phone are not a system.

Common questions