When can you legally
make the call?

Why the window is not the one you were told

Every summary of these rules prints 9am to 8pm and stops. That is correct and it is not the number an agency needs, because section 8(4) of the standard reads the hour at the called person’s usual residential address. Call across the country and your own window moves, and it moves again in October when New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory go onto daylight saving and Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory do not.

The awkward case is a single national list. The window that clears every recipient at once is bounded by Perth’s 9am at one end and the eastern 8pm at the other, which leaves a Sydney desk nine hours in winter and eight in summer rather than the eleven the standard appears to grant. Splitting the list by timezone is worth those hours.

Put this calculator on your own site

It is free to embed, on an agency site, a training portal or a blog, with no permission needed and nothing to sign. Paste this wherever the calculator should appear. It keeps working when the rules change, because it reads the same timezone logic our own dialler does.

<iframe src="https://www.listingline.com.au/tools/calling-hours/embed"
        width="100%" height="460" loading="lazy"
        title="Australian telemarketing calling hours calculator"></iframe>

The only thing we ask is that the credit line underneath stays, because that link is what pays for the tool being free.

Common questions

What hours can you make telemarketing calls in Australia?

Section 8 of the Telecommunications (Telemarketing and Research Calls) Industry Standard 2017 prohibits a telemarketing call before 9am or after 8pm on a weekday, before 9am or after 5pm on a Saturday, and at any hour on a Sunday. It also prohibits calls on seven national public holidays and on any weekday holiday given in lieu of one of them.

Whose time zone decides, the caller's or the person being called?

Section 8(4) reads the time of day at the usual residential address of the person being called, not at the caller's office. An agency in Perth calling New South Wales is inside the standard from 7am to 6pm its own time during standard time, and from 6am to 5pm when the eastern states are on daylight saving.

Can you make telemarketing calls on a Sunday in Australia?

No telemarketing call may be made on a Sunday at any hour under section 8. Research calls are treated separately and run on a wider clock under section 8(2), but a call that also promotes a product or service is not a research call, whatever it is labelled.

Does this tool check the Do Not Call Register?

No. Calling hours and the Do Not Call Register are separate obligations under separate instruments, and a number can be perfectly callable at 10am and still be one you must not ring. Washing a list is a check against the register itself and this calculator does not perform one.

Use this freely, including on your own site. If it saves you a job we would rather you linked to it than copied it, so the version your team reads stays the one we keep correct. The reasoning behind every figure is in telemarketing calling hours in Australia, by timezone.