The Federal Communications Commission sets per-minute price caps for phone and video calls made from prisons and jails under authority Congress gave it in the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act of 2023. The agency's current caps, issued as an interim rule effective December 5, 2025, run from about 9 cents to nearly 17 cents a minute for audio calls depending on facility size, with a mandatory compliance date of April 6, 2026.
Those numbers replace lower caps the FCC adopted in July 2024 and mark the second time in a year and a half that the commission has reset the rates, after phone and video providers and some sheriffs' associations argued the 2024 caps did not cover their costs.
What does the law actually require?
The Martha Wright-Reed Act, which President Biden signed on January 5, 2023, according to NPR, gave the FCC clear authority to regulate calls that stay within a single state, not just calls that cross state lines. Before the law passed, the commission could cap only interstate rates, leaving most calls — the vast majority of prison and jail calls are intrastate — outside its reach. The statute is named for Martha Wright, a retired nurse who spent years pressing the FCC to act after she found it too expensive to keep in regular phone contact with her incarcerated grandson.
The law's operative standard, carried into the FCC's rules, is that rates and charges for what the agency now calls Incarcerated People's Communications Services must be "just and reasonable." The FCC has interpreted that to mean rates tied to a provider's actual costs of providing service, rather than costs inflated to cover payments back to facilities.
How did the 2024 rate caps work?
In an order adopted July 18, 2024, the FCC cut existing per-minute caps by roughly half or more. Audio calls from state and federal prisons dropped to 6 cents a minute, down from a prior cap of 14 cents, according to the commission's order as summarized by the advocacy group Prison Policy Initiative, which has tracked the rulemaking since it began. Caps for jails, which the FCC tiers by average daily population, fell to between 6 and 12 cents a minute for audio and set interim video rates of 16 cents a minute for prisons and 11 to 25 cents for jails.
The same order banned most "site commissions" — payments telecom providers make to correctional facilities to win their business, historically funded by charging families more. It allowed a narrow exception: a payment of up to 2 cents a minute if a provider can show it reimburses the facility's actual, documented costs for services that are "used and useful," such as call-monitoring equipment the facility itself operates. It also eliminated most ancillary fees, including account set-up and deposit charges, and barred providers from seizing unused account balances when someone is released or transferred.
Why did the caps change again in 2025?
The FCC postponed implementation of the 2024 rate caps in mid-2025 and then, in an order the commission adopted in late October 2025, replaced them with higher interim figures, according to Prison Policy Initiative's account of the vote. The commission's stated rationale was that providers and some facilities said the original caps did not account for the full cost of safety and security functions, such as call monitoring and recording, that facilities require providers to perform.
The rule that took effect December 5, 2025, and appeared in the Federal Register that day sets interim audio caps ranging from 8.6 cents a minute for the largest jails to 16.8 cents a minute for the smallest, with prisons at 9.4 cents a minute. Interim video caps range from about 23 cents to 47 cents a minute. On top of those per-minute rates, the rule permits a uniform facility cost "additive" of up to 2 cents a minute across all tiers. Facilities and providers have until April 6, 2026, to bring existing contracts into compliance.
What do the rate tiers look like?
| Facility type | Audio cap (per minute) | Video cap (per minute) |
|---|---|---|
| Prisons | $0.094 | $0.470 |
| Large jails (1,000+ average daily population) | $0.086 | $0.327 |
| Medium jails (350–999) | $0.097 | $0.259 |
| Small jails (100–349) | $0.108 | $0.230 |
| Very small jails (50–99) | $0.128 | $0.263 |
| Extremely small jails (0–49) | $0.168 | $0.436 |
These figures, set out in the FCC's interim rule as implemented under the Martha Wright-Reed Act, do not include the additional facility cost additive of up to 2 cents a minute that applies across every tier.
What protections survived the 2025 revision?
The ban on most site commissions and the prohibition on many ancillary fees — deposit charges, automated payment fees, and seizure of unused balances — were features of the 2024 order that the commission's later interim rule did not eliminate, based on the FCC's published rule and Prison Policy Initiative's tracking of the docket. What changed in 2025 was the per-minute rate structure itself and the addition of the facility cost additive, not the underlying commission ban.
Is this the FCC's first attempt to regulate these rates?
No. The commission first capped interstate prison and jail calling rates in 2013 and 2014, after finding that ancillary fees alone made up close to 40% of what families spent on calls, and that fee structures were what the agency called the "chief source of consumer abuse" in the market. Those early rules were partially stayed by a federal appeals court in January 2014, and the commission spent the following decade litigating and narrowing its authority before Congress extended that authority to intrastate calls through the 2023 law.
The pattern across a decade of FCC action — cap rates, face industry and facility pushback, revise — is now repeating under the newer statute. The commission's December 2025 rule describes itself as interim, meaning the current tiered rates are not necessarily the rates that will still apply once the FCC completes further review of provider cost data.
Where the money goes matters as much as the per-minute price
Because commissions historically pushed rates upward — a provider bidding for a facility contract could offer to pay the facility more per call, then recoup that payment by charging a higher rate — the structure of who pays whom shapes what a 15-minute call ultimately costs a family, independent of the headline per-minute cap. The FCC's rules attempt to separate a facility's legitimate security costs, which the 2-cent additive is meant to cover, from commission payments that function as a facility revenue stream unrelated to the cost of phone service.
This explainer describes the FCC's regulatory framework as reflected in the agency's own rules and public record; it is not legal advice, and rates in a specific facility depend on that facility's contract and any state-level rules that may apply on top of the federal caps.
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