48 Million Complaints: What the Do Not Call Registry's 2025 Numbers Show

The Federal Trade Commission released its National Do Not Call Registry Data Book for Fiscal Year 2025, showing that overall complaints about unwanted calls rose during the fiscal year even as the underlying registry itself continues to grow, now encompassing hundreds of millions of registered phone numbers nationwide.DOCUMENTED

The annual data book, one of the FTC's standard yearly transparency reports, breaks down complaint volume by state, call type, and subject matter, providing the clearest available public picture of how unwanted telemarketing and robocall activity is trending year over year.DOCUMENTED

A registry more than two decades old

The National Do Not Call Registry launched in 2003 under the Telemarketing Sales Rule, allowing consumers to register their phone numbers to opt out of most telemarketing calls, with violations subject to civil penalties the FTC can pursue against noncompliant telemarketers. More than two decades later, the registry remains one of the FTC's most widely used consumer tools, and its associated complaint database has become a central source of data the agency and other regulators rely on to identify patterns in illegal telemarketing and robocall activity.DOCUMENTED

What the FY2025 numbers show

According to the FTC's release accompanying the Fiscal Year 2025 Data Book, overall complaints rose compared to the prior fiscal year, even as the registry itself continued its long-term growth trend in total registered numbers. The agency's release specifically noted that unwanted calls remain a persistent, roughly stable share of the complaints Americans report to the FTC across changing years and evolving telemarketing tactics, underscoring that despite the registry's maturity and scale, the underlying problem of illegal and unwanted calls has proven difficult to fully suppress through registration alone.DOCUMENTED

The data book's state-by-state breakdown allows for comparison of complaint volume across different regions, a dataset regulators, state attorneys general, and telecommunications researchers use to identify geographic patterns that might reflect either differences in illegal calling activity or differences in consumer awareness and likelihood of filing a complaint in the first place.DOCUMENTED

Robocalls remain the dominant complaint category

Consistent with prior years' data, robocalls — automated calls using a prerecorded or artificial voice message rather than a live telemarketer — continue to represent the largest share of complaints filed through the registry's complaint system. The persistence of robocalls as the dominant complaint category, despite years of FTC and Federal Communications Commission enforcement against illegal robocall campaigns, reflects both the low cost of placing automated calls at scale and the technical challenges regulators continue to face in identifying and shutting down the specific operators, often based overseas or using spoofed caller ID information, responsible for the largest volume of illegal calls.REVIEWED

How the data feeds enforcement

Complaint data collected through the Do Not Call Registry serves a function beyond simple public reporting: the FTC and its state and federal regulatory partners, including the Federal Communications Commission, use registry complaint patterns to help identify which telemarketing operations or robocall campaigns warrant formal investigation. A sudden spike in complaints tied to a specific caller ID pattern, industry, or geographic region can help direct limited enforcement resources toward the illegal calling operations generating the largest consumer harm.DOCUMENTED

A quarter century in, still an open problem

The FY2025 Data Book's release drew commentary from FTC officials underscoring that, despite the registry's now more than two-decade history, unwanted calls remain a stubbornly persistent consumer complaint category. Lois Greisman, Associate Director of the FTC's Division of Marketing Practices, has testified separately before Congress that the agency's broader fraud enforcement data continues to reflect a high volume of complaints tied to unwanted and often fraudulent phone contact, reinforcing that the registry, while a foundational consumer tool, functions as one piece of a much larger and continuously evolving effort to curb illegal telemarketing rather than a solved problem from a bygone era of landline telemarketing.

The FY2025 increase in complaint volume arrives even as the FTC and Federal Communications Commission have continued pursuing enforcement actions against illegal robocall operations and imposing stricter authentication requirements on telecommunications carriers intended to make caller ID spoofing more difficult. That complaints nonetheless rose suggests the underlying incentives driving illegal telemarketing, extremely low per-call costs combined with a large enough response rate among the millions of calls placed to remain profitable, continue to outpace the deterrent effect of registry enforcement and carrier-level technical safeguards alone.REVIEWED

State attorneys general, who frequently partner with the FTC on multistate robocall enforcement actions, have also pointed to the Data Book's state-level breakdowns as a useful tool for identifying which regions may be disproportionately targeted by specific illegal calling campaigns, information that can help direct joint federal-state enforcement resources toward the geographic areas experiencing the heaviest volume of complaints in a given reporting period.REVIEWED

The Data Book's release each year also functions as a recurring public accountability moment for the registry itself, offering an annual opportunity to assess whether more than two decades of registration, complaint-driven enforcement, and evolving carrier-level technical safeguards have meaningfully reduced the volume of illegal calls reaching American households, or whether, as the FY2025 increase suggests, the underlying economics of illegal telemarketing continue to outpace the combined deterrent effect of all these measures.REVIEWED

For individual consumers, registry officials continue to emphasize that registering a phone number remains worthwhile despite the persistence of illegal calls, since registration provides the legal basis for the FTC's own enforcement actions against callers who ignore it, even though the registry cannot, on its own, technically block calls from operators who simply choose to violate the law regardless of a number's registered status.REVIEWED

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