Most B2B leaders I speak to know about the TPS. Far fewer have heard of the CTPS, and most of the ones who have assume it covers business numbers automatically. It does not. The two registers are separate, run side by side, and a serious outbound team needs to screen against both.
What the TPS is
The Telephone Preference Service is the UK consumer opt-out register. A person adds their personal landline or mobile to the list, and from roughly 28 days later it is unlawful for organisations to make unsolicited direct marketing calls to that number unless the subscriber has given prior, specific consent. The register is operated under statutory duty by a body designated by the regulator, and the rules sit in the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations.
The TPS is large. In recent years it has held in the region of 28 million numbers, which is the bulk of UK adult phone lines. If you are cold calling consumer numbers without screening, you are almost certainly hitting registered subscribers. That is the headline compliance risk and the reason TPS screening became standard for any B2C dialler.
What the CTPS is
The Corporate TPS is the business-facing equivalent. Companies, partnerships, schools, charities and other organisations can register their corporate switchboard numbers, direct dials and any other lines used for business. Once a number sits on the CTPS for 28 days, the same prohibition applies: no unsolicited live marketing calls without prior consent. Calls made anyway are a breach of PECR, regardless of whether the recipient picks up.
The CTPS is far smaller than the TPS, with roughly 3 million numbers on it. It also has quirks that catch B2B teams out. Sole traders and most unincorporated partnerships in England and Wales count as individual subscribers for marketing law, so they belong on the TPS rather than the CTPS. Limited companies, LLPs and Scottish partnerships register on the CTPS. Mixed-status prospect lists are normal, which is why screening only one register leaves a real gap.
The five practical differences
| Question | TPS | CTPS |
|---|---|---|
| Who can register | Individual subscribers. Sole traders and most English and Welsh partnerships fall here. | Corporate subscribers: limited companies, LLPs, Scottish partnerships, public sector bodies, charities. |
| What numbers | Personal landlines and mobiles. | Business switchboards, direct dials, departmental numbers, business mobiles paid for by the organisation. |
| How updated | Continuous additions and removals. The 28-day rule applies before a new entry is enforceable. | Same continuous model, but corporate registrations must be renewed annually to stay active. |
| Who polices it | The Information Commissioner’s Office, under PECR regulations 21 and 26. | The same: ICO, same regulations. There is no separate enforcer. |
| Penalty | Monetary penalties up to £500,000 per breach pattern under PECR, sometimes paired with enforcement notices. | Identical exposure. The ICO does not discount fines because the calls were B2B. |
The annual renewal point matters
CTPS entries lapse if the subscriber does not confirm them each year. That means a number can move on and off the register over a sales cycle. If you screened a list nine months ago and never refreshed, you are working with stale data in both directions. See how often to check TPS and CTPS for a sensible cadence.
Why B2B teams need both
B2B outbound is where the two registers collide. Three patterns come up repeatedly:
- Sole traders and small partnerships. Plumbers, consultants, single-person agencies, freelance solicitors. Their business number is legally a consumer number for marketing purposes. A CTPS-only screen will miss them entirely.
- Mixed registers inside one organisation. The switchboard might be on the CTPS while a director’s personal mobile, used for business, sits on the TPS. Calling either is a breach.
- Direct dials bought from data vendors. Many B2B data tools surface direct dials that look corporate but resolve to a personal mobile. These often turn up on the TPS rather than the CTPS, which is one of the failure modes covered in our data-vendor TPS comparison.
The safe default for any UK outbound team is to screen against TPS and CTPS together, treat consent as the only legitimate override, and log the screen result against each call attempt.
What screening against both looks like
In practice you want one check that returns a status for each number without you having to know in advance which register it might be on. TPSClear treats TPS and CTPS as a single licensed lookup. You send a number, you get back a status (clear, registered, or registered with a date) and the source register. No batching overnight, no manual reconciliation between two suppliers.
The screen should run at three points in the workflow: when a contact is created or imported, on a scheduled refresh (weekly is sensible for active lists), and immediately before any outbound campaign goes out. That last check is the one that catches numbers added to either register in the days since your last sync. The deeper rationale sits in our TPS compliance guide and the underlying law in PECR explained.
If you want the official sources, the consumer register sits at tpsonline.org.uk and the corporate register at tpsonline.org.uk/ctps. Neither site is built for bulk screening, which is why most teams either license the data or use a service that already does.
Going deeper on the B2B side
If the bulk of your outbound is corporate, the CTPS rules deserve their own walkthrough: who counts as a corporate subscriber, how soft opt-in interacts with B2B calling, and where the line sits between research calls and marketing. That is covered in B2B CTPS rules explained. If you would rather see screening running inside your CRM against both registers, the native CRM integrations page shows what that looks like end to end.