# What are SMS quiet hours?

> Quiet hours are the periods when a market forbids or restricts commercial messaging — typically overnight, sometimes also on religious or national holidays. The window is set per country by the regulator or the operators, applies to the recipient's local time, and usually exempts transactional traffic such as one-time passcodes.

- Canonical URL: https://www.broadnet.me/answers/what-are-sms-quiet-hours
- Language: en
- Last reviewed: 2026-09-10
- Publisher: BroadNet (https://www.broadnet.me)

## The window is local to the recipient

Quiet hours are measured where the handset is, not where your server is. A single global send time will breach the rule somewhere. Schedule against each destination's local window, and remember that a ported or roaming number may not sit in the time zone its country code suggests — which is one more reason to know the real line status before a large campaign.

## Transactional traffic is usually exempt

Almost every market that restricts promotional messaging still permits one-time passcodes, fraud alerts, delivery notifications and service messages at any hour — a person completing a login at 2am needs their code. The exemption depends on the message genuinely being transactional. Marketing content sent on a transactional route to dodge the window is a compliance breach and, in several markets, grounds for the operator to suspend the sender ID.

## The rules differ more than people expect

Windows vary by market and change with regulation: some define quiet hours nationally, others delegate to operator policy, and several add restrictions around religious observance or election periods. Treat the window as per-market configuration that is reviewed, not as a constant you can hard-code once. Our country guides list the current position for each market we route to.

## Getting it right operationally

Hold rather than drop: queue a message that would land inside a quiet window and release it when the window opens, so the campaign still reaches the recipient. Make the send-time policy a property of the message category, not of the campaign, so a transactional message is never accidentally held and a promotional one is never accidentally released. And log the decision — when a regulator asks why a message went out at 11pm, the answer needs to be in a record, not a recollection.

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