Cold calling in France: prior consent becomes mandatory from August 11, 2026

In eight days, on August 11, 2026, commercial phone prospecting in France switches regime: no more opting out via Bloctel, only prior consent will do. Decree n° 2026-662 of July 23, 2026, published in the Official Journal, sets out how that consent must be collected, retained and withdrawn — and repeals the Consumer Code articles that organized the Bloctel opt-out list. An SMB that calls consumers to sell today, without being registered on Bloctel, often assumes it is compliant. From August 11, that logic reverses: it is the absence of explicit consent that makes the call illegal, whether or not the number ever appeared on an opt-out list.

What changes on August 11, 2026

• →Consent must be free, specific, informed, unambiguous, and given through a clear positive act — a pre-ticked box or a clause buried in general terms no longer counts.
• →It is valid for one year at most: beyond that, it must be collected again before any further call.
• →Proof of consent — a signed form, a timestamped ticked box — must be kept for at least three years and produced on the consumer’s request.
• →Bloctel disappears: the Consumer Code articles that organized it (R. 223-4-1 to R. 223-8) are repealed.
• →Phone prospecting remains fully banned, regardless of consent, for energy renovation, home adaptation for loss of autonomy, and CPF-eligible training.

Who is covered, and what the penalties are

The text sits in the Consumer Code: it targets phone prospecting aimed at consumers, not commercial calls between professionals, which remain under a separate framework. One exception survives — solicitations tied to an existing contract, where a customer already under contract can be recontacted about related or complementary products without fresh consent. For everything else, the DGCCRF can issue an administrative fine of up to €75,000 for an individual and €375,000 for a company, doubled on repeat offense — and any contract concluded following a non-compliant call is void.

What it means for your SMB

The sectors concerned are broader than they look: real-estate agencies, insurance or financing brokers, telecom resellers, alarm companies, training providers — any business still running part of its outreach through outbound calls to consumers now has to document, timestamp and retain proof of consent given upfront, not just the absence of an opt-out. That is a change in the nature of the problem: instead of checking an external list (Bloctel), it becomes keeping an internal consent register, with an expiry date to track and an access right to honor. Many SMBs will discover on August 11 that no tool currently logs this consent in a usable way — and will shift part of their outreach to channels where consent proof is built in natively, such as a WhatsApp sales agent, where the contact’s opt-in is recorded by the platform itself.

Before August 11: four concrete checks

• →List every outbound calling campaign targeting consumers and verify it rests on documented consent — not being on Bloctel will no longer protect anyone after August 11.
• →Set up a traceable consent-collection mechanism (timestamped ticked box, signed form) and store the proof for at least three years, retrievable on the customer’s request.
• →Review any consent older than a year: past that point, it no longer covers any call.
• →Check that no campaign targets energy renovation, home adaptation or CPF-funded training — those sectors stay banned regardless of consent.

The trade-off is not new: a 2005 study by T. Randolph Beard and Avery M. Abernethy, published in the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, measured the effect of the US Do-Not-Call registry — an opt-out mechanism, so more permissive than France’s new opt-in regime: calls to registered households fell by roughly half within two years, at the cost of a direct-sales channel that had previously delivered lower prices, which the authors estimated cost the average US household between $19 and $39 a year. France’s move to opt-in restricts that channel further still: the SMBs still prospecting by phone afterward will be the ones that documented consent, not the ones that relied on the silence of an opt-out file. That is exactly the kind of dated deadline a regulatory watch agent tracks on your behalf, so August 11 doesn’t arrive as a surprise during a DGCCRF inspection.