Which place’s debt rules apply—and who can help?

SettleADebt — S_TN PASS-02

Tennessee current-law authentication, 2026 rules, transition/overlap, and indexed amounts

Research baseline: October 22, 2026, Pacific. Actual PASS-02 public-source research date: October 24, 2026, Pacific.

This pass was deliberately restricted to the unresolved authentication issues from PASS-01. I did not rerun Tennessee’s classification overview, worked fee examples, or federal TSR analysis.

PASS-02 bottom line

Four conclusions changed or became materially stronger.

First, Tennessee’s current agency materials now independently authenticate Part 55 and Part 58 as the two current statutory homes. TDCI’s current program page expressly says current debt-management requirements are in TCA Title 47, Chapter 18, Part 55, and current debt-resolution requirements are in Part 58. The separate TDCI “Laws” page that says “Part 48” for debt resolution is therefore an agency-site inconsistency/typo, not a competing legal classification. The enacted legislative chain also places the 2025 Debt Resolution Services Act in Part 58. Tennessee.gov+2

Second, the exact transition statute materially narrows—but does not eliminate—the PASS-01 transition uncertainty. Section 47-18-5820 separately preserves: pre-January 1, 2026 transactions of Part 55 licensees; pre-January 1, 2026 Part 55 licenses and rights arising from issuance; and continued Part 55 licensing for businesses offering services other than debt-resolution services. Section 3 makes the new Act applicable to conduct occurring and licenses applied for or renewed on or after January 1, 2026. That structure does not expressly say that an old Part 55 license authorizes new post-January 1 debt-resolution contracts. Tennessee General Assembly+1

TDCI’s operational instruction says an already licensed debt-management provider can continue operating under that license until it expires and, at expiration, must seek an initial debt-resolution license if it meets the debt-resolution criteria. But TDCI’s January 5, 2026 public notice simultaneously says providers offering debt-resolution services to Tennessee consumers must obtain a debt-resolution license before providing those services. Those materials do not establish that new post-effective-date debt-resolution contracts may simply remain governed by old Part 55 rules. That specific overlap remains held. Tennessee.gov

Third, the existence and effective status of the permanent 2026 rules are now much better authenticated. Tennessee Secretary of State archived-rule metadata identifies permanent rulemaking-hearing rules for 0780-05-18 and 0780-05-19, filed March 17, 2026, sequence 03-16-26, effective June 15, 2026. The earlier Part 19 emergency rule was temporary. However, the operative final PDFs themselves remain unreadable through the available public reader, so this pass authenticates their filing/effective status, not every final clause.

Fourth, the exact current indexed consumer-fee dollar amounts remain genuinely unresolved. A historical official rule establishes a 2014 base year and provides that an adjustment year itself becomes the new base year. The January 2026 agency hearing text proposed continuing the annual 10% threshold/rounding mechanism and requiring the current base year and adjusted fees to be placed on a commissioner-selected website. But because the final June 2026 text and the resulting current dollar schedule could not be read, neither “2014 is still the current base year” nor any October 2026 adjusted dollar amount can responsibly be asserted. A fresh CPI calculation from 2014 could be wrong precisely because an intervening adjustment would reset the base year.

No hypothetical charge or homemade CPI calculation is substituted for that missing authority.

A. Focused substantive findings

1. Current Part 55 and Part 58 are authenticated as current statutory programs

TDCI’s current Debt Management, Debt Resolution, and Credit Services page states:

• current debt-management registration requirements are in TCA Title 47, Chapter 18, Part 55; and
• current debt-resolution registration requirements are in TCA Title 47, Chapter 18, Part 58. Tennessee.gov

That is current agency material, not itself a substitute for reading every codified provision. But it resolves the question whether the programs remain current and where TDCI presently locates them.

The General Assembly’s official House Journal independently records the operative 2025 amendment as adding a new §47-18-5801 et seq. and labels it the “Debt Resolution Services Act.” The official bill history says HB0743/SB1078 was enacted and became Public Chapter 287. Tennessee General Assembly+1

The TDCI “Part 48” discrepancy

TDCI’s separate Laws page has been indexed as listing debt resolution under “47-18-48.” That conflicts with:

1. TDCI’s current main program page;
2. the official enacted legislative materials;
3. the 2026 rulemaking materials defining the Debt Resolution Services Act as Part 58.

Accordingly, “Part 48” should not be propagated into SettleADebt’s Tennessee data. It is an agency webpage inconsistency, not evidence that the 2025 Act was codified somewhere other than Part 58.

Disposition: current statutory homes authenticated; full official consolidated code text remains a separate retrieval gap.

2. The transition statute has three distinct grandfathering rules

The House Journal reproduces §47-18-5820 in the amendment that the House adopted and passed. The official bill history shows the companion became Public Chapter 287. The three subsections should not be collapsed into one generalized “grandfathering” statement. Tennessee General Assembly+1

§5820(a): transactions

This provision protects transactions entered into before January 1, 2026 by licensees whose licenses were issued under Part 55. Rights, duties, and interests resulting from those transactions may continue under the prior-law framework.

The temporal object is the transaction, not simply the existence of the provider’s license.

§5820(b): existing licenses

This separately preserves licenses issued under Part 55 before January 1, 2026, and rights, duties, and interests resulting from issuance of those licenses.

That is broader than subsection (a) in protecting the existing license itself, but it does not expressly say: “Every new debt-resolution transaction entered into after January 1, 2026 remains a Part 55 transaction until that license expires.”

§5820(c): services other than debt resolution

This provision expressly allows a business offering services other than debt-resolution services, whose license was issued under Part 55, to continue under the Part 55 license without transitioning to Part 58.

That qualifier is consequential. It strongly supports continued Part 55 treatment for legacy businesses whose activity is genuinely outside the new definition of debt-resolution services. It does not itself solve the treatment of an activity satisfying both the older debt-management concept and the new debt-resolution definition.

Section 3: new-law temporal rule

The enacted amendment makes the Act effective:

• July 1, 2025 for rulemaking; and
• January 1, 2026 for other purposes,

and states that it applies to conduct occurring and licenses applied for or renewed on or after that later date. Tennessee General Assembly

Result for post-January 1, 2026 new debt-resolution contracts

Held—not converted into a grandfathered permission.

The safest current statement is:

A Part 55 license issued before January 1, 2026 receives statutory transition protection, but §5820(a) expressly grandfathers transactions only when entered into before January 1, 2026. Section 5820(c) separately protects continued Part 55 operation for services other than debt-resolution services. The statute as actually retrieved does not expressly authorize a legacy Part 55 licensee to originate unlimited new Part 58-type debt-resolution transactions after January 1 merely because its older license remains unexpired.

That conclusion is reinforced by TDCI’s current public announcement that, starting January 1, providers offering debt-resolution services to Tennessee consumers must first obtain the relevant TDCI license. Tennessee.gov

3. Agency transition guidance helps, but creates an interpretation issue rather than eliminating it

TDCI’s licensing instructions state in substance that a provider already licensed as a Debt Management Services Provider may continue to operate under the license until it expires; at expiration, if it meets the criteria for a Debt Resolution Services Provider, it can apply for an initial debt-resolution license.

That is meaningful agency operational evidence.

It should not be rewritten as either:

• “all new settlement contracts may stay under Part 55 until old-license expiration,” or
• “every legacy provider had to obtain a Part 58 license immediately on January 1 regardless of its existing license.”

The statutory transition language is more granular than either proposition.

TDCI’s January 5 announcement makes the tension clearer. It says the DRSA took effect January 1 and warns providers not to engage in activity requiring licensure until their license has been approved. It describes debt-resolution services broadly enough to encompass traditional settlement operations. Tennessee.gov

Present PASS-02 interpretation boundary

Three situations can now be separated:

That is a substantial narrowing of PASS-01 C013.

4. Permanent 2026 rules are authenticated as effective, but their complete operative text still is not

A materially different official source route succeeded: the Tennessee Secretary of State’s archived-rule index.

It identifies:

• Chapter 0780-05-18 — Rules and Regulations for Debt Management Services
• Chapter 0780-05-19 — Rules and Regulations for Debt Resolution Services

as Rulemaking Hearing Rules, filed March 17, 2026, effective June 15, 2026, under filing/sequence 03-16-26.

That is sufficient to improve PASS-01’s status finding: these are not merely proposed January rules or an emergency-rule hypothesis. The permanent package reached an effective date.

The same official archive identifies the earlier 0780-05-19 emergency rule as a temporary rule with an emergency period extending only into June 2026. Thus an October 24, 2026 analysis should not treat the December 2025 emergency text as current merely because a copy remains available in the archive.

Important limitation

The archive result authenticates filing metadata. It does not make every clause of the final 03-16-26 filing readable.

The direct final-rule and filing PDFs previously returned 403, and this pass did not repeatedly hammer the same blocked URLs. New TDCI rule landing-page routes were attempted instead and also returned 403.

Accordingly:

Verified now: final permanent rule package exists; Chapters 18 and 19; filing date; effective date; sequence.

Not verified now: exact final wording of each 2026 amendment, including whether every January redline provision survived exactly unchanged.

5. Indexed Part 55 consumer-fee amounts remain held—and the reason is now sharper

The earlier official Chapter 0780-05-18 version contains the inflation-adjustment rule. Its historical text establishes that:

• 2014 was adopted as the base year;
• the administrator determines index movement;
• when the statutory threshold is reached, specified statutory dollar amounts are adjusted;
• an adjustment year becomes the new base year; and
• the current base year and adjusted fees are to be publicly listed.

That historical rule is useful because it shows why a simple “2014 CPI → 2026 CPI” computation is not legally reliable. If an adjustment occurred in between, the base year would reset.

The January 2026 official TDCI hearing/redline material proposed amending parts of Rule 0780-05-18-.14. The indexed text retains an annual index determination, the 10% threshold and statutory rounding, and states that the current base year and adjusted fees are to be placed on a website selected by the commissioner.

But that January material was a notice/hearing-stage redline, not final operative authority.

What this pass could not authenticate

No readable official current schedule was located that states, for October 2026:

• the current inflation base year;
• the adjusted §47-18-5523 initial fee amount;
• the adjusted per-creditor/monthly maximum;
• the adjusted counseling/education amount;
• the adjusted returned-payment amount; or
• the date on which the last adjustment took effect.

Therefore PASS-01’s nominal statutory base amounts must remain identified as base figures, not October 2026 verified maxima.

Why no calculation is supplied

Because the historic rule says an adjustment year itself becomes the next base year, calculating a CPI percentage from 2014 without knowing whether one or more administrator adjustments occurred would risk compounding from the wrong legal base.

No exact current amount should be published until the administrator’s current adjusted-fee schedule or readable final operative rule is obtained.

6. No new final-rule authority resolves the custodial/overlap question

PASS-01 C004 established from enacted Part 58 language that a Part 58 licensee does not simply take custody or control of consumer funds apart from properly earned fees.

PASS-02 did not retrieve readable final Rule 0780-05-19 language sufficient to establish whether the final regulations contain an additional interpretation harmonizing:

• traditional custodial DMP activity under Part 55;
• noncustodial concessions;
• an activity that independently meets Part 58’s debt-resolution definition; and
• legacy-license transition.

Consequently, the statutory result is preserved, but no new regulatory inference is added.

7. Targeted interpretation/case check

A focused official-domain search for §47-18-5820 and Tennessee debt-resolution interpretation did not return a Tennessee appellate decision or Attorney General opinion resolving the post-2026 legacy-license/new-contract issue. The results instead surfaced TDCI’s current announcement and legislative materials. Tennessee.gov+1

That is a search result, not a statement that no relevant case, administrative order, or interpretation exists anywhere.

PASS-01 C040 therefore remains an evidence-gap finding, with the scope narrowed to the specific transition/overlap questions investigated here.

B. PASS-02 source register

C. PASS-02 material claim register

D. Original PASS-01 claim patch map

The original IDs are retained rather than silently replacing them.

E. Failed-route table

These failures are preserved separately from substantive authority.

F. Remaining dependency / exact next-evidence table

G. PASS-02 scope coverage

H. Researcher self-check

I read current TDCI program and agency guidance, the General Assembly’s current bill-history material, and the relevant enacted-transition language exposed in the official House Journal. For the House Journal PDF, the relevant transition page was also inspected through the available PDF-page rendering rather than relying only on an index extract.

I obtained new official Secretary of State filing metadata proving the June 15, 2026 permanent-rule effective date. I did not turn that metadata into an assertion that I had read the final operative rule clauses.

The January 2026 TDCI redline was kept explicitly in proposed/hearing-stage status. Its direct PDF route subsequently failed, so its indexed text was not promoted to final-law status.

I did not recompute indexed amounts, assume that 2014 remains the current base year, or turn a statutory nominal amount into an October 2026 ceiling.

I did not treat the TDCI “Part 48” typo as law where multiple stronger official sources identify Part 58.

I did not create other chats, use Deep Research/Work/Codex, file anything, contact Tennessee, change accounts or permissions, purchase access, use private borrower data, or claim a local save.

This is a researcher self-check, not independent review. It does not establish full-state completion, A066 acceptance, or publication readiness.

END S_TN PASS-02.