France Cold Calling Ban 2026: The Consent Rules for Agencies

August 19, 2026. Since 11 August 2026, telephone prospecting in France is prohibited by default. Not restricted, not opt out, prohibited, across every sector of activity. The Bloctel opt out register that agencies scrubbed their lists against no longer exists. For any agency running outbound calling into France, or building AI voice agents that dial French numbers, the compliance artefact you used to produce on request has been deleted and replaced with one you now have to create yourself.

The rule sits in Article 13 of Law number 2025-594 of 30 June 2025, implemented by Decree number 2026-662 of 23 July 2026, and is summarised by the French government on service-public.gouv.fr, updated on the day it took effect. The DGCCRF published its own guidance for businesses on 27 July 2026. This article is written for operators, not lawyers, and it is not legal advice. If you call French numbers at any volume, take French counsel.

What actually changed on 11 August 2026

1. Telephone prospecting is now banned by principle for companies in all sectors, not only the energy and home improvement sectors that were already restricted.
2. There are exactly two ways to call lawfully. Either the call concerns a contract already in force and the approach relates to the object of that contract, or the consumer gave prior agreement to be contacted for commercial prospecting.
3. Consent must be free, informed, and given by a clear positive act. The company must state the nature of the goods or services the consent covers.
4. Consent must carry a stated duration, that duration can never exceed one year, and it cannot be tacitly renewed.
5. Withdrawal must be simple. The government guidance states it can be done orally alone.
6. Calling hours are fixed: Monday to Friday, 10:00 to 13:00 and 14:00 to 20:00. Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays are closed.
7. Any contract concluded after 11 August following a call that broke these rules is not valid.
8. The burden of proving consent falls on the company, and the DGCCRF states the proof must be kept for a minimum of three years and handed to the consumer on request.
9. Bloctel ceased to exist on 11 August 2026.
10. Prospecting for subscriptions to newspapers, periodicals or magazines sits outside the ban.

The B2B line most coverage skipped

Almost every English language write up of this said France banned cold calling. That is too broad, and the imprecision matters commercially. The rule lives in the Code de la consommation and protects the consumer, meaning a natural person acting outside their professional activity. French legal analyses of the reform are consistent that business to business prospecting was not moved into the opt in regime and remains under the older opt out framework, where you may contact a professional at professional contact details about an offer connected to their activity and honour objections.

So a Dubai, London or Toronto agency calling French companies on company numbers about a business offer is not inside this ban. An agency selling to sole traders, freelancers and micro businesses is standing directly on the line, because a sole trader's mobile is frequently the same number they use as a private individual, and the classification is decided by the capacity in which the person is acting, not by which column of your CRM the number sits in. If your French list is mostly one person businesses, treat it as consumer data and build consent. That decision costs you volume once. Getting it wrong costs you the contracts.

Consent expires in one year. The proof outlives it by two.

These are two different clocks and almost no outbound stack tracks either. Consent has a hard ceiling of twelve months with no tacit renewal, so a lawfully built French calling list starts decaying the day it is collected and is entirely worthless within a year unless it is refreshed by another positive act. The evidence obligation runs the other way. The DGCCRF requires the proof to be retained for at least three years and produced to the consumer on demand, so you are holding records about permissions that expired two years earlier.

The practical consequence is that a French consent record needs four fields your CRM probably does not have: the date of the positive act, the specific goods or services named at the moment of collection, the stated duration, and the artefact itself. A checkbox with a timestamp does not satisfy this, because it does not evidence what the person was told they were consenting to. If you are wiring this into an automated outbound system, the consent object has to be a first class record with an expiry date attached, not a boolean on the contact.

The calling window has an exception you cannot really use

The hours are not a courtesy convention, they are the rule, and there is only one way around them. The company may call outside the authorised window if the person explicitly consented to being called on a date and at a time that were precisely indicated to them. Read that as written. A prospect saying evenings are better is not an exception. A booking form offering a specific slot that the prospect selects is. That is a small design detail with a large consequence for anyone running callback flows or AI voice agents that dial back on their own schedule, because an autonomous dialler choosing its own retry time will drift outside the window without anyone deciding to.

The penalty that actually bites is not the fine

Coverage of this reform has circulated figures of 75,000 euros for an individual and 375,000 euros for a company, which correspond to the administrative fine ceilings in article L242-16 of the Code de la consommation. Several outlets presented those as per call amounts. That framing is not what the code says, and an agency should not plan around it either way, because the fine is a regulator event that may never arrive.

The sanction that changes the economics is contract nullity. A contract concluded after a non compliant call is not valid, and the party who gets to act on that is the customer, not the DGCCRF. Every deal your French calling motion closed is revenue that a counterparty can unwind at a moment of their choosing, typically the moment they become unhappy for an unrelated reason. Nullity converts a compliance question into a revenue quality question, and it is the reason a signed French deal from an undocumented call is worth less on your books than the same deal from an inbound form.

What it means for operators

If you sell into France by phone, four moves are worth making this month. First, classify your French list by capacity rather than by source, and move every sole trader and freelance number into the consumer bucket by default. Second, add consent as a dated record with an expiry, a named scope, and a stored artefact, and let it fall out of the callable segment automatically at twelve months rather than relying on anyone to remember. Third, hard code the calling window into the dialler or the workflow rather than the call script, because a rule that only exists in a script is a rule your automation does not have. Fourth, retire any process step that referenced Bloctel, because scrubbing against a register that no longer exists is a control that reports success while doing nothing.

The wider read is the same one the email side of this business learned earlier. France already runs one of the stricter regimes for written outbound, which we covered in our guide to cold email laws in France, and the direction of travel across both channels is that permission has to be documented at the moment it is given rather than reconstructed later. Agencies that build the consent record into the lead generation system itself keep selling into these markets. The ones treating it as paperwork lose the market and, under a nullity rule, some of the revenue they already booked.

Consumers who receive non compliant calls can report them through SignalConso, the DGCCRF platform, which means enforcement signal now comes from the people you are calling rather than from a list you can check.