Station Compliance›Field Notes
Licensing
The window most people assume closed permanently in the 1990s is open again, briefly, and the application deadline lands the day after the EAS security deadline.
By Mark Shannon ·
If you have ever asked how a person gets a new radio station and been told "you don't, you buy one" — that answer has been correct for most of the last thirty years, and it was completely correct for the last two and a half.
It is not correct this month.
The FCC's authority to run spectrum auctions lapsed in March 2023, for the first time in the roughly thirty years the auction programme had existed. It was not a policy decision, it was an expiry. Congress simply did not renew it. For two years and four months the Commission could not start a new auction of anything, which included the vacant FM allotments that are the only route to a brand-new commercial full-power radio station.
That authority came back on July 4, 2025, when the One Big Beautiful Bill Act restored it — and restored it long, through September 30, 2034.
Auction 114 is the first FM broadcast permit auction since the lapse. The Commission announced it on May 11, 2026.
132 full-power FM construction permits. Close to a hundred of them have never been offered in any previous auction — these are allotments that have sat vacant, not leftovers that failed to sell.
A word about what you would actually be winning, because this trips people up: a construction permit is not a licence. Win one, and you have a defined period to build the facility and then file an application for a licence to cover the construction permit. You are buying the right to build a station, plus the obligation to actually do it.
| Short-form application (FCC Form 175) due | September 30, 2026, 6:00 p.m. ET |
| Bidding begins | February 2, 2027 |
That first date is the one that matters, and it is close. Everything else in the process — upfront payments, bidding rounds, the long-form Schedule 301-FM if you win — happens after it and is only available to people who filed by it.
If you run a station, that deadline is the day after your § 11.35(d) compliance deadline. Two unrelated FCC clocks, one week. It is worth putting both on the same calendar page now rather than discovering the collision on the 28th.
This is the part that makes the auction genuinely relevant to people who are not already broadcast groups.
The FCC offers a new entrant bidding credit in broadcast auctions, which discounts the winning bid for applicants with few or no existing media interests. The whole design intent is that someone who owns nothing can outbid someone who owns a great deal, for the same allotment, at a lower real cost. Eligibility and the exact credit tiers are set out in the auction's procedures public notice, and they turn on how many other media interests you and your attributable owners hold.
If you have been told that new licences only ever go to consolidators, the bidding credit is the specific mechanism designed to make that untrue. It does not always work. It is not nothing.
The filing fee is not refundable if you lose. Form 175 is a real application with ownership disclosure and a stack of certifications, and unsuccessful bidders do not get the money back.
The FCC's systems are yours to drive. Consultants can prepare an application, but bidding happens in the Commission's auction system and the bidder is the one at the keyboard.
The permit is the cheap part. A full-service FM licence carries transmitter and studio capital cost, music licensing, annual regulatory fees, quarterly issues/programs lists, a public inspection file, EAS obligations — and, as of this September, the § 11.35(d) security requirements that apply to every EAS Participant from the day you sign on. The auction price is an entry ticket, not the cost of the thing.
Anti-collusion rules bite early. Once the short-form window closes, applicants for overlapping markets are restricted in what they can say to each other about bidding, and those rules run through the whole auction. Get advice on this before you talk to anyone about your plans.
Television is a different picture. There is no equivalent open auction of new full-power TV construction permits — the post-repack spectrum landscape simply does not have vacant allotments to hand out the way FM does. New entrants into television realistically buy existing facilities, or look at LPTV.
LPFM runs on filing windows rather than auctions, because LPFM is noncommercial and mutually exclusive applications are resolved by a points system, not money. The last general LPFM window was 2023. There is no announced next one. If you want a community station rather than a commercial one, that window — whenever it comes — is your route, and it costs nothing to file.
Noncommercial full-power FM on the reserved band also uses windows and a points comparison, not auctions.
So the honest summary: for a new commercial FM station, right now, there is a real and unusual opportunity with a deadline this month. For everything else, the answer is still mostly "buy one" or "wait for a window."
Auction dates move, and third-party pages go stale — at least one well-known reference site still says the short-form window has not been announced. The Federal Register notice of August 7, 2026 and the FCC's own Auction 114 page are the sources that govern. Confirm the deadline against those before you rely on it, and if you are seriously considering filing, get a communications attorney involved this week rather than next.
Everything on this site is free to read. The Program Chain Compliance Kit is the implementation version — the device-by-device reference, the network patterns for a one-rack station, and the worksheets that leave a paper trail behind the work.
The rules on this site change without warning — a deadline gets waived, a filing window opens, a Public Notice lands on a Friday. Leave an address and you get an email when something changes that affects a small station. Nothing else, and one click to leave.