France Telephone Marketing Consent Rules: 11 August 2026

Key Takeaways

• From 11 August 2026, calling a French consumer for commercial prospecting without prior consent is prohibited. Décret n° 2026-662 du 23 juillet 2026 (JORF n°0172, 25 July 2026) sets out how that consent must be collected, stored and withdrawn.
• The record is not evidence of valid consent — it is a condition of it. Under Article R. 223-1 II, consent does not count if any required information is missing from the stored proof.
• Consent expires. Article R. 223-1 I 3° caps the consented period at one year from the date of collection, and the proof must be archived for three years.
• Merely continuing to browse a website is named in the decree as something that is not a clear positive act. So is a pre-written line acknowledging consent without express agreement.
• Breach of Articles L. 223-1 to L. 223-5 carries an administrative fine of up to €75,000 for a natural person and €375,000 for a legal person under Article L. 242-16 — and any contract concluded off the back of an unlawful call is void.

Introduction

Somewhere in your checkout there is a phone-number field. It probably says something like "for delivery updates", it probably has no separate consent control next to it, and the numbers it collects probably flow into the same customer table as everything else. On 11 August 2026 that field becomes a regulated object in France — not because of what you do with the number, but because of the moment you ask for it.

France is switching telephone canvassing from opt-out to opt-in, retiring the Bloctel machinery. The statute did that. What landed on 25 July 2026 was the decree that says what "consent" has to look like in your database. It reads less like marketing law and more like a schema definition, which is why this is an engineering problem before it is a scripting one.

What Changes for Telephone Marketing Consent in France on 11 August 2026

The prohibition is stated in the first alinéa of Article L. 223-1 of the Code de la consommation: it is forbidden to canvass a consumer by telephone, directly or through a third party acting on its behalf (« par l'intermédiaire d'un tiers agissant pour son compte »), where that consumer has not previously expressed consent to commercial prospecting by that means. Légifrance marks this version "en vigueur à partir du 11 août 2026", as modified by Loi n° 2025-594 du 30 juin 2025, article 13. Two things follow from that one sentence: calls placed by your outsourced call centre are your problem too, and the default has flipped from "anyone who has not objected" to "nobody who has not agreed".

The definition of consent has revocability built into it

Article L. 223-1 defines consent, for the purposes of that article, as a manifestation of will that is libre, spécifique, éclairée, univoque et révocable — free, specific, informed, unambiguous and revocable — by which a person accepts, through a clear positive act, that personal data concerning them be used for telephone prospecting.

That list will look familiar. GDPR Article 4(11) uses four of those five adjectives; the fifth, revocability, sits in Article 7(3) as a separate right rather than inside the definition. France has folded it in, so a consent record with no withdrawal field does not merely lack a column — it fails to describe the thing the statute defines.

The third alinéa places the burden squarely: it is for the professional to prove consent was collected under those conditions. That matches GDPR Article 7(1), where "the controller shall be able to demonstrate that the data subject has consented to processing of his or her personal data". Our practical read: if you already keep defensible proof-of-consent records, you have the habit but not the schema, because the French decree is far more prescriptive about what the row must contain than the GDPR baseline is.

What the prohibition does not reach

The existing-contract exception in the fourth alinéa disapplies the prohibition where the solicitation occurs in the performance of an ongoing contract and relates to that contract's subject matter — including proposing products or services afférents ou complémentaires to it, or of a nature to improve its performance or quality. Calling a customer about the order they have placed is not canvassing. Calling last year's customer about a new range is.

B2B is outside the prohibition entirely, since Article L. 223-1 binds solicitation of un consommateur; CNIL's guidance page on telephone prospecting, last updated 10 June 2026, states that prospecting professionals can rest on the organisation's legitimate interest where the subject matter relates to their profession. Newspapers, periodicals and magazines are exempt under Article L. 223-5.

Running the other way, the fifth alinéa bans telephone prospecting for services, equipment sales or works on housing aimed at adaptation to ageing or disability, energy savings, or renewable-energy production. Consent does not unlock those sectors. The statute carries one express exception, in its own words: the ban applies « à l'exception des sollicitations intervenant dans le cadre de l'exécution d'un contrat en cours au sens du quatrième alinéa du présent article » — so an existing-contract call is still permitted there.

Does This Regime Apply to a Store Outside France?

Nobody can tell you yet, and any source that sounds certain is guessing. Chapter III of the Code de la consommation — Articles L. 223-1 to L. 223-7 — contains no territorial-scope provision at all. It says who is protected (a consumer) and who is bound (a professional), and is silent on where either sits.

That is honest uncertainty rather than a shrug, so here is what to do meanwhile. The conservative read is that a regime protecting French consumers is meant to reach the calls they actually receive, and complying costs you a schema change rather than a business-model change. Build the record properly for every French consumer number you hold, and take advice before concluding that a non-French establishment puts you outside it.

Article L. 223-6 adds that this chapter applies sans préjudice to Articles 49 to 56 of the Loi Informatique et Libertés. Consumer law and data-protection law stack here, so satisfying the decree does not settle your GDPR position — and the fine ceilings are separate.

The Consent Record Is a Condition of Validity, Not Evidence of It

This is the thesis of this article. In most consent regimes the record is how you win the argument later. Under Article R. 223-1 II, the record is part of what makes the consent real in the first place.

The provision lists three circumstances in which the consumer cannot be regarded as having consented. The first is that the required information was not given to them or does not appear on the proof of consent held under Article R. 223-2. A gap in your database is therefore not an evidentiary weakness; it is a defect in the consent itself.

The second is that the call falls outside the consented period, or outside the authorised date, days and hours. The third is that consent did not result from a clear positive act — and the decree names two things that do not qualify: a pre-written statement on a document by which the consumer acknowledges consenting without any express agreement of theirs being required, and le simple fait qu'il poursuive sa navigation sur un site internet, the mere fact of continuing to browse a website.

That last one is aimed squarely at web forms. If your phone field sits under a general "by continuing you agree" line, the decree has already told you the answer.

The five things the request must say

Article R. 223-1 I requires the professional, or the third party acting on its behalf, to collect consent through a demande claire et compréhensible containing five elements:

1. The identity of the professional and, where applicable, of the third party acting on its behalf, plus the nature of the goods or services the consent covers.
2. The proposal put to the consumer to consent, or not, to being called for commercial purposes by the person and for the subject matter named at point 1.
3. The period during which the consumer consents to be canvassed, which may not exceed one year from the date the consent was collected.
4. A statement that they may withdraw consent at any time, including during that period, and how to do it.
5. A statement that they will be able to access, on request, the durable medium containing the proof of their consent.

Point 1 catches stores using an agency: the call centre has to be named at collection time, before it exists as a vendor decision. Point 3 catches everybody, because it means a French telephone-marketing consent has an expiry date and your CRM has to know it. A one-year consent nobody re-asks for does not decay into a weaker permission — once the period ends, calling lands in R. 223-1 II 2° and there is no consent at all.

The Consent Record Schema French Law Now Requires

Article R. 223-2 requires the professional to put in place a system for retaining and archiving, in digital format, the Article R. 223-1 I information, the date and hour at which consent was given, and where applicable the date and time the consumer agreed to be called when that falls outside the standard windows. Read together with R. 223-1, the two articles dictate a table:

Two rows need a caveat. R. 223-2 names the stored fields, and a withdrawal timestamp is not among them; R. 223-1 I 4° and R. 223-3 create the right to withdraw without saying you must log when it happened. Given that the third alinéa of L. 223-1 puts the burden of proof on you, an unrecorded withdrawal is indefensible in practice — so treat that row as engineering necessity rather than a field the decree spells out. The export artefact is likewise an obligation you must be able to produce, not a column.

Three years from collection is the archive floor. The material may be kept beyond that only for a period not exceeding what is needed for the exercise or defence of the professional's legal claims — a narrower licence than the open-ended "keep it in case" instinct most retention schedules encode. If your retention schedule treats consent logs as one undifferentiated class, this is a reason to split them.

The consumer can demand the proof, and you cannot make them sign up to get it

During those three years, the professional — or the third party acting for it — must supply the proof of consent to any consumer who asks, gratuitement, on a durable medium, within a reasonable time, and in an individualised form.

The decree then closes the obvious loophole. That durable medium may be access to a dedicated online interface, but the access must be secured by authentication that may not consist of creating a customer account, nor of any other step imposing personal-data processing beyond that generated by the consent collection itself. Turning a proof request into a signup funnel is specifically foreclosed, which suggests somebody on the drafting side had seen it tried.

Withdrawal, Call Windows and Frequency

Article R. 223-3 is two sentences long and both bite. The professional must let the consumer withdraw consent at any time by means that cannot be more complex than those used to collect it. And withdrawal peut être exprimé oralement — it may be expressed orally.

An oral withdrawal during a call is a valid withdrawal. If your agents can take one but your systems cannot record it before the next dialler pass, the gap between those two facts is where a violation lives. GDPR Article 7(3) already required withdrawal to be as easy as giving consent; the French text adds a channel your web preference centre does not cover.

Days, hours and frequency live in a different article — D. 223-9, which Légifrance shows in a version running from 1 March 2023 to 11 August 2026. It authorises calls only Monday to Friday, excluding public holidays, and only from 10:00 to 13:00 and 14:00 to 20:00 — hours the article ties to the consumer's own time zone (« ces heures correspondant à celles du fuseau horaire du consommateur ») — caps canvassing at four attempts per consumer per 30 calendar days by the same professional, and requires a 60-day pause after a refusal expressed during a call.

Article 4 of décret n° 2026-662 deletes that article's second alinéa, and the last sentence of the third alinéa, which becomes the second. Applying that arithmetic to the published text — our reading of the amendment, not a quotation of a consolidated article — the position from 11 August 2026 is:

Neither deletion is a relaxation. Out-of-hours calling moves to the sixth alinéa of L. 223-1, which is stricter: the consumer must consent explicitly to being called at a precisely specified date and time (« à une date et à un horaire précisément spécifiés »), and the professional must be able to attest to it. The 60-day pause becomes redundant once a refusal during a call is simply a withdrawal of consent, after which calling is not late — it is unlawful.

There is one narrow call-back permission. Article R. 223-4 provides that, for the purposes of the fifth alinéa of L. 223-1 (« Pour l'application du cinquième alinéa de l'article L. 223-1 »), calling a consumer to answer an information request they made is not prospecting, provided the professional can evidence the request, calls within five working days, and discusses only the goods or services the consumer asked to be called about — with the justification archived for three years. Note the anchor: this sits under the banned-sector alinéa, and is not a general licence to call anyone back within a week.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Treating this as a call-centre problem. The obligations that will actually trip a store are at collection — the wording next to the phone field, the named third party, the expiry date — not at dial time. By the time a script is involved, the record either exists correctly or it does not.

Missing the duty that applies even if you never call. Article L. 223-2 requires that when a professional collects a consumer's telephone data, it informs them that commercial telephone solicitation requires their prior consent, save under the existing-contract exception. Where the collection happens on conclusion of a contract, the contract itself must state clearly and comprehensibly that canvassing a consumer by telephone without prior consent is prohibited. That is a checkout and terms change, and it does not depend on your marketing plans.

Assuming a bought list transfers its consent. The eighth alinéa of L. 223-1 presumes that any professional who profited from unlawful telephone solicitations is responsible for the breach, unless it demonstrates it was not the origin of the violation. The rebuttal requires exactly the records a purchased list rarely comes with.

Underestimating the commercial sanction. Article L. 242-16 caps the administrative fine at €75,000 for a natural person and €375,000 for a legal person for breaches of Articles L. 223-1 to L. 223-5. The quieter penalty is the ninth alinéa of L. 223-1: any contract concluded with a consumer following a call made in breach of that article is void. Explaining a void order book is a worse meeting than explaining a fine.

How PrivacyForge Helps

PrivacyForge treats a consent record as something that has to be defensible field by field, which is what this decree now demands in law. The consent-management module stores each consent as a structured record — what was shown, when it was captured to the second, which purpose and scope it covered, and when it was withdrawn — rather than a boolean on a customer row.

That maps onto the French schema directly: purpose scoping covers the "nature of the goods or services" element, timestamped capture covers the date-and-hour requirement, and withdrawal is a first-class event rather than a deletion. Expiry and the free durable-medium export are the two places a French telephone-consent programme needs work beyond a standard GDPR setup. All of it assumes you know where your consumer phone numbers live and what each is permitted to be used for — if you cannot answer that from a record of processing activities, the schema work is the second job.

This article is informational content, not legal advice. The territorial reach of these provisions is genuinely unsettled, and any store operating cross-border should take French-qualified advice on it.

Frequently Asked Questions

When do France's new telephone marketing consent rules take effect?

They take effect on 11 August 2026. Article 5 of décret n° 2026-662 du 23 juillet 2026, published in JORF n°0172 of 25 July 2026, states that the decree enters into force on that date. It implements Loi n° 2025-594 du 30 juin 2025, which replaced the Bloctel opt-out system with a consent requirement in Article L. 223-1 of the Code de la consommation.

Does the French telephone marketing ban apply to B2B calls?

No. Article L. 223-1 prohibits canvassing un consommateur, so business-to-business calling sits outside it. CNIL's guidance page on telephone prospecting, last updated 10 June 2026, states that prospecting aimed at professionals may be based on the organisation's legitimate interest where the subject matter relates to their profession, subject to the usual data-protection obligations.

Can I still call a customer who has already placed an order?

Usually yes. The fourth alinéa of Article L. 223-1 disapplies the prohibition where the solicitation occurs in the performance of an ongoing contract and relates to that contract's subject matter, including offering products or services related or complementary to it, or of a nature to improve its performance or quality. A call about an unrelated new range is not covered by that exception.

How long must I keep proof of telephone marketing consent in France?

Three years from the date consent was collected, under Article R. 223-2. The record may be kept beyond that only for a period not exceeding what is required for the exercise or defence of the professional's legal claims. During the three-year period you must supply the proof free of charge, on a durable medium and in individualised form, to any consumer who asks for it.

Does consent to telephone marketing expire in France?

Yes. Article R. 223-1 I 3° requires the consent request to state the period during which the consumer agrees to be canvassed, and that period may not exceed one year from the date the consent was collected. Calling after it ends falls under Article R. 223-1 II 2°, which means the consumer cannot be regarded as having consented at all.

What is the fine for telephone marketing without consent in France?

Article L. 242-16 of the Code de la consommation provides that any breach of Articles L. 223-1 to L. 223-5 is punishable by an administrative fine of up to €75,000 for a natural person and €375,000 for a legal person. Separately, the ninth alinéa of Article L. 223-1 makes void any contract concluded with a consumer following a call made in breach of that article.

Conclusion

The instinct with a rule like this is to brief the phone team and move on. That is the wrong order. The decree's centre of gravity is Article R. 223-1 II, which makes an incomplete record a defect in the consent rather than a difficulty in proving it — and records are built where data is collected, not where calls are made.

So the first task is the checkout form, the terms, and the table behind them: name the scope, name the third party, stamp the hour, set the expiry, and make withdrawal a recordable event an agent can trigger mid-call. The second is the export path, because a consumer can ask for their proof and you may not charge them or make them open an account to get it. 11 August does not move.

If you want a structured way to inventory which of your consent captures would survive Article R. 223-1 II, start with a compliance check and work outward from the fields you cannot currently produce.

Sources

• Décret n° 2026-662 du 23 juillet 2026 relatif aux modalités de recueil, de conservation et de retrait du consentement du consommateur à des fins de prospection commerciale par voie téléphonique
• Code de la consommation, Article L. 223-1 — version in force from 11 August 2026
• Code de la consommation, Chapitre III — Consentement au démarchage téléphonique (Articles L. 223-1 à L. 223-7)
• Code de la consommation, Titre IV — Sanctions (Article L. 242-16)
• Code de la consommation, Article D. 223-9 — days, hours and frequency of prospecting calls
• CNIL — Prospection commerciale par téléphone (hors automate d'appel) : quelles sont les règles ?
• GDPR Article 7 — Conditions for consent
• GDPR Article 4 — definitions, including consent at Article 4(11)