Research · Updated 2026-07-12 · 10 min read

Robocall trends 2026

The volume of US robocalls has held roughly flat at 4B+/month in 2025-2026 despite significant regulatory and technological progress. That's the story: the market has reached a plateau, not a decline. This piece unpacks why.

Trend 1: STIR/SHAKEN plateaued

STIR/SHAKEN caller authentication has now been widely rolled out across major and mid-tier US carriers (per FCC implementation reports). It has moved the needle on inter-carrier spoofed calls — but the plateau in robocall volume shows that spammers adapted. Overseas-originated calls, small carrier gaps, VoIP endpoints, and attestation loopholes still allow high-volume operators to keep dialing.

Trend 2: Scam category shifts

The dominant scam categories in 2025-2026 (per FTC Consumer Sentinel and carrier reporting): Medicare-related scams (surge each Open Enrollment window), auto warranty pitches (persistent), IRS impersonation (persistent), utility shutoff scams (weather correlated), and package-delivery scams (holiday correlated). Grandparent scams targeting seniors remain a persistent high-impact category.

Trend 3: FCC enforcement has ramped

The FCC has pursued a meaningfully higher number of enforcement actions in 2024-2026 than in earlier years, including multi-million-dollar fines against major violators and originating carriers that fail to block known-bad-actor traffic. Enforcement has affected volumes at the margins but has not closed the economic incentive: automated dialing is still cheap enough that marginal actors continue.

Trend 4: The rise of AI-assisted consumer defense

The consumer-side defensive stack shifted meaningfully in 2025-2026. Carrier-level spam labeling (T-Mobile Scam Shield, Verizon Call Filter, AT&T ActiveArmor) is now a default in the US market. Reactive blockers (RoboKiller, Nomorobo, Hiya) still dominate the third-party category but face a structural limit: they can only block numbers already reported.

A new category — AI-assisted live call screening — is emerging alongside them. Instead of blocking known-bad numbers, live screeners engage the unknown caller conversationally and let the user decide based on structured intake. Google Call Screen (Pixel-only) pioneered the pattern; CallerFilterPro is the first cross-device consumer product in the category.

Trend 5: The false-negative cost got real

The long-tail cost of "just don't answer unknowns" — missed doctor's callbacks, missed school pickups, missed contractor follow-ups — has become a more visible narrative in consumer press in 2025-2026. This is arguably the trend that most changes the defensive-stack conversation, because reactive blockers don't address it. Only live screening does.