Consumer contract cooling-off and rescission periods by US state and transaction type

State-by-state comparison of the cancellation windows consumers have after signing specific types of contracts. Each record is one (state, transaction type) pair with the number of days the consumer has to cancel, the notice method required, refund timeline, and the statute citation. Covers transaction types that commonly carry cooling-off periods: home solicitation sales, health club memberships, timeshare purchases, extended warranties, hearing aid purchases, life insurance policies, dating/social referral services, credit repair services, membership travel, reverse mortgages, and door-to-door sales. The federal FTC cooling-off rule (16 CFR 429, 3 business days for door-to-door sales ≥$25) is the baseline; states add their own transaction types and periods on top. Answers 'how many days do I have to cancel a gym membership in [state]', 'what is the cooling-off period for timeshare purchases in [state]', and 'can I cancel this extended warranty'.

The data

Where this came from

Every record above links the page it was taken from and quotes the sentence that states it. These are the 3 sources this dataset was assembled from.

• ecfr.govhttps://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-D/part-429
• ag.state.mn.ushttps://www.ag.state.mn.us/consumer/publications/CoolingOffPeriod.asp
• guides.sll.texas.govhttps://guides.sll.texas.gov/right-to-cancel/general-information

Machine-readable

• data.jsonThe whole dataset — every record with its source URL and source quote.
• Open Knowledge Format bundleOne JSON object per line — every record's frontmatter and quoted span exactly as it is held here, in one fetch.
• data.csvThe same records as one flat table, for a spreadsheet or a dataframe. The last four columns are the source URL, the quoted sentence it was read from, the date we last checked it, and which columns are our reading rather than the page's words.
• How this is made and checkedWhat "verified against source" does and does not mean.

From your own code

Same records, same quotes, without scraping the page: refsource is on PyPI and npm. Each value comes back carrying the URL it was read from and the sentence on that page that states it — .source and .quote sit on the value itself rather than in a side channel, so the checking step is available instead of skipped.

pip install refsource
refsource lookup state-consumer-cooling-off-periods state=Federal

npx -y refsource lookup state-consumer-cooling-off-periods state=Federal

Set your AI assistant up to use this

Two files and no account. Put this in .mcp.json at the root of your project — Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code and Codex all read that file — and your assistant can look this dataset up instead of recalling it. The server is remote, keyless and read-only.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "referencesource": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://referencesource.org/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Add to Cursor · or, on the command line: claude mcp add --transport http referencesource https://referencesource.org/mcp --scope project

Then one line in the project's CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md, so the assistant knows when to reach for it:

When a question needs "Consumer contract cooling-off and rescission periods by US state and transaction type", call the referencesource MCP server at https://referencesource.org/mcp (tool `search_records`, dataset_slug `state-consumer-cooling-off-periods`) instead of answering from memory — every record it returns carries its source URL and a verbatim quote from that page.

What each tool does, and the servers built over single registers: Connect your AI assistant.

31 records. last verified against source 2026-08-16. due for re-check by 2027-08-16.

Licence. US state government works — public domain. Federal FTC rule is US government work.