Colorado No-Call List: Registration, Complaints, and Penalties

You can join the Colorado no-call list for free at coloradonocall.com or by calling 303-776-2678 or 1-800-309-7041.¹ Once your number is on the list, most telemarketers are legally barred from calling or texting it. The list is run by the Colorado Public Utilities Commission, and the Colorado Attorney General enforces violations.²

How to Register

Signing up takes a minute. You need only your ten-digit phone number and your zip code. The form has an email field, but it’s optional. There is no cost to consumers.³ When you type the number online, leave out dashes and parentheses.

Residential landlines, personal wireless numbers, and fax lines all go through the same system.¹ If you later want telemarketers to be able to reach you, you can remove a number through the same website.

When the Calls Actually Stop

Your number is not shielded the day you register. Colorado law gives telemarketers up to thirty days after the start of each calendar quarter to update their suppression lists.⁴ Depending on when in the quarter you sign up, the practical wait is roughly a month. Calls that come in during that window are not necessarily violations.

What the List Covers

Colorado’s definition of “telephone solicitation” sweeps in voice calls, faxes, and text messages sent to encourage you to buy, rent, or invest in goods or services.⁵ That makes unsolicited promotional texts from businesses just as illegal as a cold sales call, provided no exemption applies.

Separately, Colorado forbids telemarketers from blocking their caller ID. If their equipment can display a number, they must let it show.⁴ This applies to any telemarketing call in the state, listed number or not.

Who Can Still Call You

Several categories of callers remain legal even after you register:

Charitable organizations that follow Colorado’s nonprofit reporting requirements, and anyone calling on their behalf.⁵
Political calls supporting or opposing a candidate or ballot measure, and political polls, which fall outside the statutory definition of telephone solicitation.⁵
Companies you’ve done business with in the past eighteen months, as long as neither side has ended the relationship. Purchases, applications, and ongoing contracts all count.⁵
Surveys and research calls with no sales pitch attached.

The existing-business-relationship exemption causes most of the confusion. A purchase eighteen months ago keeps the door open; nineteen months of silence closes it, and your registration applies again. Telling a company directly to stop calling ends the relationship for these purposes regardless of how recently you bought something.

Federal Calling Hours

Colorado’s statute sets no specific calling hours, but the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act does: telemarketers may only call between 8:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m. in your local time zone.⁶ A call at 7:30 a.m. or 9:15 p.m. breaks the rules regardless of any list.

Filing a Complaint

If prohibited calls continue after the registration window has passed, file a complaint through the Colorado No-Call website or by calling 1-800-309-7041.⁷ Complaints go to the Public Utilities Commission, which forwards patterns of violations to the Attorney General for possible action.

Document everything you can: the date and time of the call, the number on your caller ID, the name of the company or caller if they identified themselves, and what they were selling. A single report rarely triggers an investigation, but repeated complaints about the same company build the record enforcement needs.

Penalties and Private Lawsuits

A violation of the Colorado No-Call List Act is treated as a deceptive trade practice under the state Consumer Protection Act, which allows the Attorney General to pursue civil penalties.⁷ Each illegal call counts as a separate violation, so penalties against repeat offenders stack.

You don’t have to wait for the state. Colorado law lets consumers bring their own actions, including in small claims court, under the Consumer Protection Act.⁷ The federal TCPA goes further: $500 per violation, which a court can triple to $1,500 per call if the telemarketer acted willfully.⁶ A dozen illegal calls can mean $6,000 to $18,000 in damages. Small claims court is designed to be navigable without a lawyer.

Register Federally Too

Colorado’s state list and the federal National Do Not Call Registry are separate. Signing up for one does not enroll you in the other, and it’s worth doing both. Register federally at donotcall.gov or by calling 1-888-382-1222. Federal registration is permanent and never expires unless you remove the number or it gets disconnected and reassigned.⁸⁹ The federal list carries essentially the same exemptions as Colorado’s.

Why Some Calls Will Still Get Through

The callers most willing to ignore any no-call list are the scammers who are already breaking other laws. Fraudulent robocalls routinely spoof caller ID to display fake local numbers, which also makes them harder to trace and report. No registry stops them on its own.

The FCC’s STIR/SHAKEN framework now requires carriers to authenticate that calls actually originate from the number shown, and all voice service providers must file robocall mitigation plans describing how they block illegal traffic.¹⁰ Your carrier likely offers free screening tools as well: AT&T ActiveArmor, T-Mobile ScamShield, and Verizon Call Filter all label suspicious calls. On the device side, iPhones have “Silence Unknown Callers” and Google Pixel phones offer “Call Screen.”¹¹ Running these alongside your no-call registration gets you closer to a quiet phone than the list can deliver by itself.

1
Colorado No-Call List. Colorado No-Call List
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Public Utilities Commission. Colorado No-Call
3
Justia. Colorado Code 6-1-905 – Establishment of Colorado No-Call List
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Colorado Revised Statutes. Colorado Code 6-1-904 – Unlawful to Make Telephone Solicitations
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Justia. Colorado Code 6-1-903 – Definitions
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Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 47 USC 227 – Restrictions on Use of Telephone Equipment
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Public Utilities Commission. Colorado No-Call Complaints
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National Do Not Call Registry. National Do Not Call Registry
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Federal Trade Commission. National Do Not Call Registry FAQs
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Federal Communications Commission. Combating Spoofed Robocalls with Caller ID Authentication
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Federal Communications Commission. Call Blocking Tools and Resources