Abandoned call

An abandoned call is one a person answers and nobody is there. The Telemarketing Sales Rule fixes the moment exactly: a call is abandoned if a person answers it and the telemarketer does not connect the call to a sales representative within two seconds of that person's completed greeting. For a loan officer buying leads, that sentence is the whole boundary a dialer operates inside, and the reason a borrower sometimes says hello into silence.

The clock starts at the greeting, not at the dial

Two words in the definition do most of the work. The first is answers. A call is only capable of being abandoned once a person picks it up, so a line that rings out unanswered or lands in voicemail sits outside the definition. The second is completed greeting. The two seconds run from the end of what the consumer says, which means a clipped "hello" and an unhurried "hello, this is Maria speaking" set two different deadlines for the same dialer.

Where the prohibition sits matters as much as what it says. It is one item in the Rule's list of abusive telemarketing acts or practices, and that list binds a telemarketer who engages in the conduct and a seller who causes a telemarketer to engage in it. Buying the calling rather than doing it does not move the conduct somewhere else.

Source: 16 CFR 310.4(b)(1)(iv), which reads that an outbound telephone call is abandoned under that section if a person answers it and the telemarketer does not connect the call to a sales representative within two seconds of the person's completed greeting, sitting under the § 310.4(b)(1) chapeau for abusive telemarketing acts or practices. Read 20 September 2026 at ecfr.gov.

What the three percent is actually three percent of

The figure everyone quotes is not a permitted abandonment rate. It is the first of four conditions in a safe harbor, which opens by saying that a seller or telemarketer will not be liable for violating the abandonment prohibition if the conditions that follow are met. Abandoning calls stays prohibited conduct either way. The safe harbor decides liability, not legality.

The denominator is where dashboards and the rule part company. The condition is technology that ensures abandonment of no more than three percent of all calls answered by a person, measured over the duration of a single calling campaign if that campaign runs less than 30 days, or separately over each successive 30-day period or portion of one that the campaign continues. Calls dialled, calls connected and calls answered are three different counts, and only the last one is the rule's. A dialer reporting an abandonment rate against everything it dialled is reporting a smaller number than the one the rule asks for, and a campaign average smoothed across several months is not the measurement window either.

Source: 16 CFR 310.4(b)(1)(iv) for the two-second test from the consumer's completed greeting, and 16 CFR 310.4(b)(4)(i) for the three percent of all calls answered by a person, measured over the duration of a single calling campaign if less than 30 days or separately over each successive 30-day period or portion thereof that the campaign continues. Text read 20 September 2026 in two independent copies that agreed word for word: the eCFR and the govinfo XML of the same section.

The other three conditions are the ones people forget

A rate alone buys nothing. Alongside the technology condition, the safe harbor asks that each telemarketing call placed allows the telephone to ring for at least fifteen seconds or four rings before an unanswered call is disconnected. It asks that whenever a sales representative is not available within two seconds after the completed greeting, a recorded message is promptly played stating the name and telephone number of the seller on whose behalf the call was placed. And it asks that records establishing compliance with those three are retained, pointing to a separate section of the Rule for how that is done rather than setting the terms itself. Because that section is not quoted here, no retention period is printed on this page.

The recorded-message condition is the one a borrower can hear. A drop that plays nothing at all is not the behaviour the safe harbor describes, which is worth knowing before you assume the silence on a shared lead came from a compliant system that simply ran out of representatives.

Whose rule you are reading

Everything above is the Federal Trade Commission's Telemarketing Sales Rule, at 16 CFR part 310. The Federal Communications Commission runs a separate telemarketing regime under its own rules at 47 CFR 64.1200, with its own text and its own figures for the same subject matter. They are two regimes, not one rule quoted twice, and the wording on how the abandonment rate is measured is not identical between them. Quoting a number from one under the citation of the other is the most common way this topic gets written up wrongly. Whether a dialer belongs on your desk at all is a different question, worked through in do you need a dialer for purchased leads.

What a borrower brings to your first hello

A consumer who submitted one form can field several calls from numbers they do not recognise, and some of those calls will have nothing on the other end. By the time you dial, hanging up on silence may already be a habit. That is context for your opening line rather than a verdict on the lead, and the fuller set of reasons a number does not pick up is in why mortgage leads do not answer.

One thing this page deliberately does not give you is a count of how many times a purchased lead gets dialled in its first minutes, or by how many buyers. Numbers of that shape circulate widely and every version traced back to a marketing blog post rather than to a study that can be opened and checked, so none is printed here. The regulation quoted above says nothing on the subject either. It defines when a call is abandoned and when liability for abandoning one is avoided, and that is the full extent of what it settles.

Source: 16 CFR 310.4(b)(1), the Rule's chapeau listing abusive telemarketing acts or practices and binding both a telemarketer who engages in the conduct and a seller who causes a telemarketer to engage in it · 16 CFR 310.4(b)(4), which states that a seller or telemarketer will not be liable for violating § 310.4(b)(1)(iv) if its conditions are met, covering the fifteen seconds or four rings before an unanswered call is disconnected, the recorded message stating the name and telephone number of the seller on whose behalf the call was placed, and the retention of records establishing compliance under § 310.5(b)-(d). Read 20 September 2026 at ecfr.gov and govinfo.gov. No retention period appears on this page because § 310.5 was not read here. The Federal Communications Commission's separate rules at 47 CFR 64.1200 were not read for this page and none of their figures are quoted on it.