The FCC’s 2026 Wireless Exposure Review: What Changed, and What Rules Still Apply?

November 7, 2026

The 2026 FCC action did not change any exposure limits. The agency’s Office of Engineering and Technology (OET) issued a public notice, DA 26-997, on September 17, 2026, in ET Docket 13-84, asking for comments on how the existing radiofrequency (RF) exposure rules were developed, following a 2021 court decision that sent the 2019 rulemaking back for a more complete explanation. The rules that apply to wireless devices are the same ones that applied before the notice was published, and a survey of your home measures your environment, not device compliance. Here is the whole story, in the order it happened.

A Request for Comments Is Not a Rule Change

The single most important distinction in this story is procedural. A public notice that opens a comment period is a step inside an existing rulemaking. It asks people to submit evidence and argument. It does not, by itself, adopt, amend, or repeal anything. Headlines that describe the 2026 notice as a “review” or a “reassessment” are accurate about the process and can mislead about the outcome: as of this writing, no new limit has come out of it, and nothing in a notice or a filing establishes a health effect. For the parallel HHS action, which is a separate agency process with its own docket, see our coverage of the HHS request for information.

The Timeline in Four Steps

1. 2019: the FCC retains the existing limits. In the rulemaking documented in FCC 19-126, the agency concluded that its existing RF exposure limits should remain in place.
2. August 13, 2021: the D.C. Circuit remands. In Environmental Health Trust v. FCC (No. 20-1025), the court remanded the 2019 decision without vacating it, asking the agency for a reasoned explanation on the specified issues. The word that does the work is “remanded”: the 2019 limits continued to apply while the agency went back and explained its reasoning more fully.
3. September 2026: the notice and the original deadline. OET issued DA 26-997 on September 17, 2026, and the Federal Register notice of September 22, 2026 published it with October 22, 2026 as the original comment deadline.
4. The latest verified status. As of November 7, 2026, the original deadline has passed. A complete live check of the docket was not available when this post was prepared, so we are not reporting extensions, orders, or effective dates that we could not verify. The status box below tells you exactly where to look.

What the Notice Asks About

The notice groups its questions in three clusters, and it is worth keeping the clusters distinct from the answers, because a comment letter’s position is not the agency’s position and not a court holding:

• Portable-device compliance testing. How the rules’ testing procedures apply to the devices people actually carry and use.
• Children, long-term exposure, and the proliferation of wireless devices. Whether the rules adequately account for long-term, low-level exposure and for the growth in the number and variety of wireless devices in daily life, including changes in technology.
• Environmental impacts. The assessment questions the rulemaking is required to consider about the broader environment.

One procedural detail matters for anyone who has read the comment letters floating around social media: the notice confined comments to the evidence properly before the court in the underlying case. That means the docket is a record of a specific legal proceeding, not a free forum, and a commenter’s claim in that record is an assertion, not a finding. When we describe this story, we keep three things separate: what the agency has stated, what the court has held, and what commenters have argued. A screenshot of a comment letter is none of those three, and it is the most common way this story gets misread.

Why the scope matters to a homeowner: a remand is a request for better reasoning on specified issues, not a suspension of the rules. The limits the 2019 decision retained continued to apply while the case was pending, and they continue to apply now. Nothing in the procedural history, the notice, or the comment period changes what a device may emit, and any headline that implies otherwise has skipped the word “remanded.”

What Rules Still Apply

The rule in force is 47 CFR § 1.1310, which sets the FCC’s maximum permissible exposure (MPE) limits for RF energy. In broad terms, the section defines exposure limits, expressed as power density (mW/cm²) or specific absorption rate (SAR), for the general population and for controlled exposure, with values that vary by frequency. Those are device-compliance limits: they govern what a device may emit, determined under defined testing conditions, before it is sold.

It is worth understanding what those limits are for, because the rulemaking’s questions are about how they were developed. The MPE limits are thermal-based: they are set to prevent tissue heating from RF energy, and they are expressed per frequency band because the way energy is absorbed changes with frequency. A device earns its place on the market by passing the testing procedures the section defines, and the authorization for a specific device is a public record you can look up in the FCC’s equipment authorization search. That record tells you a device was tested and authorized under defined conditions. It does not tell you what the device does in your bedroom, because your bedroom is not the test setup.

That is the different question a homeowner actually has, which is what is present in the room where you sleep or work. An ambient survey measures the combined field from every source in and around the space, in V/m or power density at the relevant frequencies, and it is a screening activity, not a compliance test. A device that is fully compliant can still be the loudest thing in a small room, and a room that reads low is not a compliance statement about any device in it. We keep the two questions separate in every report we write, and the 2026 rulemaking does not change that separation.