Robocall Guide · Settlements
TCPA statutory damages, explained
Most laws make you prove what you lost in dollars. The TCPA doesn’t. It sets the price of an illegal robocall in advance, $500 per call, so you can collect without proving the call cost you a cent.
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Short answer
“Statutory damages” are a dollar amount written directly into the law. Under the TCPA (the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act), each illegal robocall or text carries $500 in statutory damages, and you don’t have to prove you lost money, missed work, or were harmed in any measurable way. You prove the illegal call happened; the statute supplies the price.
The short version
- Statutory damages are a fixed dollar figure set by the statute itself, here, $500 per call.
- You don’t have to prove a financial loss; the call being illegal is enough.
- This is different from “actual damages,” which require you to show a real-world dollar harm.
- The $500 figure stacks per call and rises to $1,500 for willful violations.
What “statutory damages” means
When Congress writes a law, it sometimes decides ahead of time what a violation is worth, instead of leaving it to a jury to estimate. That fixed amount is called statutory damages.
The TCPA sets that number at $500 for each call or text that violates it. Get fifty illegal calls, and the baseline is fifty times $500.
Why you don’t have to prove a dollar lost
This is the part that surprises people. With most claims, you have to show concrete harm: a hospital bill, lost wages, property damage. With the TCPA, the illegal call is the harm Congress chose to compensate.
That design is deliberate. A single robocall might cost you thirty seconds and some annoyance, too little to justify a lawsuit if you had to prove damages the old-fashioned way. By fixing the value at $500, Congress made it worth ordinary people’s while to enforce the law, and made it expensive for companies to ignore it.
- No need to show you lost money.
- No need to prove emotional distress.
- No expert witness putting a value on your time.
Statutory damages vs. actual damages
It helps to see the two side by side, because they answer different questions.
Statutory damages: a fixed amount the law assigns whether or not you can prove a dollar loss.
The TCPA lets you recover the greater of the two. In practice the $500 statutory figure usually exceeds whatever a single robocall cost you, so that’s the number that matters. You’re not choosing between them. You get whichever is larger, and for robocalls that’s the statutory $500.
How the $500 grows
The baseline is $500, but two things make claims larger:
- Stacking. Each illegal call is its own $500 violation. Twenty calls is $10,000, not $500.
- Willfulness. If the company called knowingly or willfully, the clearest example being calls after you said stop, a court can raise the figure to $1,500 per call.
In Higgs v. Golden Title Loans (No. 2:20-cv-2559, W.D. Tenn.), 385 wrong-number calls at the willful $1,500 rate came to $577,500: statutory damages, stacked and trebled, doing what the law intends.
What this means for your claim
You don’t need a paper trail of losses to have a real case. You need the illegal calls. Keep your call log, save voicemails and spam texts, and note any time you told the caller to stop. From there, the statute does the heavy lifting on value.
One caution worth stating plainly: every case is different, and prior results don’t guarantee an outcome. Statutory damages set the per-call value, but whether a given call qualifies, and whether it was willful, are facts a court decides.
Related: Willful violation damages · How TCPA damages are calculated · What is my claim worth? · TCPA penalties
Real results, real citations
Actual TCPA recoveries Max has helped secure.
Wrong-number prerecorded debt-collection calls.
Lucas v. Synchrony Bank (N.D. Ind.)
Telemarketing to Do-Not-Call list & after opt-out.
Campbell v. Everything Breaks (D. Nev.)
385 wrong-number calls at $1,500 each.
Higgs v. Golden Title Loans (W.D. Tenn.)
Prerecorded calls to cell phones without consent.
Key v. Miracle Faith Center (N.D. Fla.)
Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Every case is different.
TCPA statutory damages: FAQs
Do I have to prove the robocall cost me money?
No. That’s the whole point of statutory damages. You prove the call was illegal, and the law assigns $500 to it regardless of whether you can show any financial loss.
Is $500 per call or per company?
Per call. Each illegal call or text is its own violation worth $500, so the figures add up across an entire campaign rather than being capped at a single payment.
What’s the difference between statutory and actual damages?
Actual damages are the real dollar loss you’d have to prove. Statutory damages are a fixed amount the law sets in advance. The TCPA lets you recover the greater of the two, which for robocalls is almost always the $500 statutory figure.
Can statutory damages ever be more than $500?
Yes. For a willful or knowing violation, a court can raise the figure to $1,500 per call. Calls that continued after you told the company to stop are the classic example.
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