France, 11 August 2026: cold calling moves to prior consent, and the burden of proof changes sides

What changed on 11 August 2026

The French regime for telephone canvassing has switched from an opposition logic to a consent logic. Until 10 August 2026, calling a consumer was lawful in principle, unless that consumer had registered on Bloctel. Since 11 August, the call is unlawful in principle, unless prior and provable consent exists.

The legal foundation rests on two texts. Article 13 of Law no. 2025-594 of 30 June 2025 against all forms of public-aid fraud rewrites article L. 223-1 of the Consumer Code. Decree no. 2026-662 of 23 July 2026, published in the Official Journal of 25 July, sets out how consent is to be collected, kept and withdrawn, rewriting articles R. 223-1 to R. 223-4 and repealing the provisions governing the opt-out register.

The definition of consent is taken from the GDPR: a freely given, specific, informed, unambiguous and revocable expression of will, through a clear affirmative act. A pre-ticked box, an acceptance buried in general terms, or a generic agreement to receive "commercial offers" do not meet those conditions.

The practical consequence weighs more than the change of principle: it is for the professional to prove that consent was obtained under the required conditions. There is no longer a comfortable waiting position in which the absence of complaints stood in for compliance.

The six obligations now borne by the caller

The decree of 23 July 2026 turns a legal principle into very concrete operational obligations. They come down to six points.

A call outside those slots remains possible in one case only: the consumer has explicitly agreed to be called at a precisely specified date and time, and the professional can evidence it.

The exceptions, and exactly where they break

The text provides for two exceptions, one sector-specific safety valve and three absolute prohibitions. None of them is as broad as people hope in the meeting room.

The ongoing contract. The call remains lawful if it takes place as part of the performance of an ongoing contract and has a direct connection with the subject matter of that contract. This is the most widely used exception, and the most fragile. The breaking point is drift: a service call that shifts towards an unrelated offer leaves the exception and becomes canvassing without consent. On contact center floors, that drift is culturally encouraged, often rewarded, and rarely measured.

The written press. Canvassing for the sale of newspapers and periodicals escapes the prohibition, but remains subject to the permitted days and hours.

Three sectors are prohibited even with consent: energy renovation and energy-saving works, adapting homes for ageing or disability, and the personal training account (CPF). One safety valve exists: a call back in response to an express request for information from the consumer, within five working days, strictly limited to the goods or services for which they asked to be called.

B2B remains outside the scope of L. 223-1, which targets consumers. Business-to-business prospecting continues to fall under the GDPR (legal basis, information, simple right to object) and, for SMS and email, under article L. 34-5 of the French Postal and Electronic Communications Code. Beware of grey areas: craftspeople, self-employed professionals and micro-entrepreneurs canvassed on a mixed-use product.

Pre-existing databases do not switch over automatically. A file built or acquired before 11 August 2026 is not usable simply because it existed. Old, generic consent does not demonstrate agreement to be called by the named professional, on the category of products concerned, within the last twelve months. And deficient proof cannot be completed retroactively.

What is at stake

The penalty regime combines four layers, and it is their accumulation that creates the real risk.

Two points deserve particular attention. First, nullity of the contract does not merely strike the call: it destroys the revenue that call produced, along with the commissions paid and the accounting reversals that follow. Second, the presumption of liability of the beneficiary exposes the principal to the faults of its subcontractor or its intermediary, including offshore. Investigative powers also allow unannounced inspections in call centers, including at floors established abroad as soon as they canvass French numbers.

Finally, an unconsented call combined with insistence, pressure or false credentials may be reclassified as a misleading or aggressive commercial practice, which opens the criminal route.

Who enforces, and with which counters

The structural novelty is not only the reversal of the principle: it is the triangulation of regulators around a single criterion, the existence of valid and provable consent. One and the same unconsented call is simultaneously a consumer-law breach, a data processing operation without a legal basis and, if it travels over a poorly authenticated number, a telecoms policing matter.

The counters that will trigger inspections are public, and they are already pointing in one direction.

These figures are the official thermometer of the reform. A marked fall in the SignalConso counter in 2027 will be read as success; a plateau will trigger a tightening. Either way, the companies named in reports will form the inspection queue.

The regulatory calendar stacking on top

11 August is not an isolated event. It sits within a sequence that, for regulated sectors, runs through to 2027.

One insurance-specific point is often misread: the ordinance of 5 January 2026 rewrote article L. 112-2-2 of the French Insurance Code, removing the two-step sale rules introduced in 2021, while maintaining the obligation to record pre-contractual telephone communications and to keep them for two years. In other words, the recording obligation remains, the two-step sale returns in another form on 1 January 2027, and the stock of recordings stays enforceable throughout.

The blind spot: oral withdrawal spoken during the call

This is the quietest provision of the decree, and the one that will generate the most breaches. Withdrawal of consent may be expressed orally, during the call. It is enforceable the moment it is spoken. It requires no formality, no letter, no ticked box.

Yet on a contact center floor, a significant share of those refusals never reaches the system. The reasons are ordinary, which is exactly what makes them systemic:

• the advisor is at the end of the conversation, under handling-time pressure, and the disposition codes offered in the tool do not exactly match what was said;
• the refusal was voiced in the middle of the call rather than at the end, and was then covered over by the rest of the exchange;
• the individual interest of the advisor or of the floor is not to burn a record that can still be called back;
• the refusal was expressed at a subcontractor, and the feedback loop to the principal is asynchronous, when it exists at all.

Every untraced refusal mechanically manufactures a subsequent unlawful call. And the scissor effect is brutal: the proof of that breach is your own recording. An inspection has nothing to reconstruct. It listens to the conversation in which the refusal was spoken, then looks at the call logs.

The proof is already in your recordings

The new regime moves the center of gravity of compliance: from an obligation to act towards an obligation to prove. And the raw material of that proof already exists, in bulk, in a resource most companies retain without ever using.

In regulated sectors it is not even optional. In insurance, recording pre-contractual communications and keeping them for two years remain mandatory. Those files can be seized during an inspection. They contain the proof of what was said, including everything nobody ever listened to.

It is a double-edged weapon, and it should be stated plainly: a recording proves compliance just as readily as breach. The only variable is who listens to it first. Today, in a typical organisation, manual quality control covers 2 to 5 % of conversations. In other words, in 95 % of cases the company has no idea what its own piece of evidence contains.

AI-powered conversational analysis changes that equation, not by adding a layer of surveillance, but by making an already-constituted stock readable. It allows a shift from a listened sample to an exhaustive review, and produces, call by call, a timestamped record of what was actually said. On this point, see our article on sales compliance in regulated sectors, and our complete guide to quality monitoring in call centers.

The nine points to check on 100 % of calls

The text translates directly into criteria that can be verified inside a conversation. Here is the minimum scorecard that any organisation calling consumers should apply, whatever its tooling.

The indicators to put in place now

Telephone prospecting dashboards were built for a regime that no longer exists. The answer rate, long the king of production reporting, loses its status as a directing indicator: it measures the ability to reach people, at a moment when the question has become the ability to reach them lawfully. Outsourcers themselves acknowledge the shift towards conversion rate on consented leads, post-call NPS and twelve-month retention. A useful calibration point: the conversion rate of an unqualified outbound campaign was already stuck between 1 and 2 % before the reform.

Here are the indicators that replace the old ones, and what they reveal.

The seventh indicator deserves a word. Because consent expires after twelve months and is not tacitly renewed, the inbound call becomes the strategic resource of outbound canvassing. Every inbound conversation, every service call, every contact linked to an ongoing contract is a lawful opportunity to collect or renew consent. Organisations that start measuring this capture rate now will have a usable database in twelve months. The others will discover their problem when their file has expired.

Where to start

The right sequence is not to redesign everything, but first to establish a factual baseline of what is actually being said in your calls.

1. Choose a pilot scope: one campaign, one team, or one call reason with high consumer volume.
2. Analyse one month of conversations on that scope with the nine-point scorecard, to obtain a starting picture rather than an impression.
3. Calculate the withdrawal gap: how many refusals were spoken, how many reached the CRM, and how long it took. That is the figure that triggers decisions.
4. Fix the propagation chain first, before touching the scripts. A perfect script on a leaking chain protects nothing.
5. Rewrite the collection script around the four disclosures, and verify through analysis that it is actually spoken, not merely circulated.
6. Set up the expiry pipeline at 30, 60 and 90 days, and measure the capture rate on inbound calls.
7. Document: keep, for each period, a timestamped report of the compliance level observed and of the corrective actions taken. In an inspection, demonstrating an active control system counts as much as the raw result.

On capturing every call upstream of that chain, see our article on SIPREC recording from your telephony infrastructure. On reporting the findings, see AI summaries and PDF report exports.

Find out what your calls actually contain

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11 August 2026 does not make telephone canvassing impossible in France: it makes it either provable or unlawful, with no state in between. The organisations that come through the reform unharmed will not be the ones with the best-written procedures, but the ones that know what their conversations actually contain: where consent was properly collected, where a refusal was spoken without being heard, where a service call drifted away from its subject. That material already exists, it is recorded, and in regulated sectors it is even retained by law. The only question left is who listens to it first.

Sources

• Law no. 2025-594 of 30 June 2025 against all forms of public-aid fraud, article 13, rewriting article L. 223-1 of the Consumer Code.
• Decree no. 2026-662 of 23 July 2026 on the collection, retention and withdrawal of consumer consent for telephone prospecting purposes.
• French Consumer Code, articles L. 223-1 to L. 223-7, version in force on 11 August 2026.
• DGCCRF, telephone canvassing rules applying to companies. SignalConso figures and inspection volumes from the DGCCRF 2025 annual report.
• CNIL, telephone prospecting outside automated calling systems, and recommendation of 12 March 2026.
• Arcep, consumer protection, number authentication and spoofing reports.
• Ordinance no. 2026-2 of 5 January 2026 on distance marketing of financial services, rewriting article L. 112-2-2 of the French Insurance Code.