Recording Consent Laws: One-Party vs All-Party States

Federal law lets you record a conversation you take part in, because the federal rule needs the consent of only one party. ¹ About 11 US states primarily require every participant to agree before a conversation is recorded, and that is the rule that trips people up. ² This guide sets out the statutes we could read directly, shows how they apply to recording meetings and calls, and covers the UK, EU and Canadian rules. It is general information, not legal advice. For the wider picture of where voice data goes, see our guide to whether voice to text is safe and our overview of speech to text privacy.

Federal law needs the consent of only one party, but the penalty ceiling is five years

The federal Wiretap Act says it is not unlawful to intercept a communication when you are a party to it, or when one party has consented. ¹ That makes the federal rule a one-party rule. Federal law still makes unlawful interception a crime, and a violation can be fined, imprisoned for up to five years, or both. ³

The federal floor does not decide every case. A state can set a stricter rule, and many of the rules that catch people out are state rules. ¹ The sections below cover the states whose statutes we could read.

Several states require every participant to consent before a call is recorded

Under an all-party rule, the recording is lawful only when everyone in the conversation has agreed. The statutes below work that way for a participant who records a private conversation or call. Each one is a state statute, and each is worded differently.

Florida treats a violation as a serious offence. Violating the general ban is a felony of the third degree. ⁸ The practical test is simple: if any person on the call could be recorded without having agreed, assume the all-party rule applies. You will meet that case most often with a group meeting, a conference line, or a caller who is not in the state where you are.

The statutes differ in detail. Florida and Maryland use the phrase "prior consent," while Washington refers to consent "first obtaining" from all participants. In practice, the safe approach is the same for all four: get a clear yes from each person, before the recording starts.

Work through four questions before you record anyone

A recording that involves other people usually turns on four questions. Answering them in order tells you which rule to check first, and which statute to read.

1. Who is in the conversation? List every person who will be heard, including people who join late or dial in on a conference line. Treat each of them as a participant when you apply the consent rule.
2. Where is each person? A call that crosses a state line can bring in the rule of each state, so note the location of every participant, not only your own.
3. Is the recording private or public? The consent rules in the statutes above cover private communications and confidential conversations. A speech given to a public audience is a different situation, and the statutes quoted here do not cover it.
4. What notice will you give? Decide how you will announce the recording and how you will record the agreement, so that the consent is part of the evidence.

If the answer to the second question includes a state on the all-party list, the all-party rule is the one to meet. If every participant is in a one-party state, the one-party rule is the one to check, and a clear announcement costs nothing and keeps the evidence. If you cannot tell, take legal advice before you record.

Delaware and Oregon's phone rules are one-party, which some lists get wrong

Several published lists place Delaware among the all-party states. The statute does not support that for the interception offence. The statute allows a person to intercept where the person is a party to the communication or one party has given prior consent. ⁹ Read the current code and take legal advice before relying on that reading, because the chapter has other exceptions.

Oregon splits the rule in two. For a telecommunication you are not part of, the ban does not apply when at least one participant consents. ¹⁰ For a conversation, the rule is different. It turns on whether every participant has been told, not on whether they agreed. ¹¹ The annotations on that statute page include commentary on court decisions about the in-person provision, so check the current position before you rely on the text.

This is why a single headline list can mislead. A call and a face-to-face conversation can fall under different tests in the same state, and a list that gives one answer per state misses that.

Connecticut lets you record a call with a spoken notice instead of consent

Connecticut's rule for private telephone calls gives three routes to a lawful recording. The recorder can have the consent of all parties. The recorder can also give a verbal notification that is recorded at the beginning and is part of the call. Or the recording can carry an automatic tone warning. ¹²

So an "all-party" label describes Connecticut's consent route, not every lawful route. The statute sits under a heading that names it as an action for illegal recording of private telephonic communications. ¹³ If you record a call in Connecticut, the safest course is the one that works under every route: state the recording at the start, record that statement, and then ask each person to confirm.

A call across state lines can fall under the stricter state's law

When the two ends of a call are in different states, the question is which law governs. The California Supreme Court faced a version of this in 2006, and it found a true conflict between California and Georgia law over a Georgia firm's recordings of calls with California clients. ¹⁴ The court concluded that the comparative impairment analysis supported applying California law to those calls. ¹⁵

The lesson for a person recording a call is that the stricter state's rule may protect the other end, even if your own state allows the recording. The statute does not say which state's law a court will apply in every case, so the practical rule is to meet the stricter standard whenever any participant is in an all-party state. For a fuller discussion of how this affects business calls, see our question on recording calls across state lines.

Which states require all-party consent depends on the statute, and several published lists disagree. For the full question and the lists it covers, read which states require all-party consent. Our glossary defines the two rules as one-party consent and all-party consent.

Violations carry criminal ceilings from one year to five years

The penalties vary, and the ceilings are the most useful way to compare them. Under the federal Wiretap Act, the maximum is five years. ³ Maryland's felony carries up to five years of imprisonment. ¹⁶ Canada's wilful interception offence carries the same five-year maximum. ¹⁷ California's section 632 sets a lower ceiling of one year in a county jail. ¹⁸

These are ceilings, not typical sentences. A chart of maximums shows what the legislature allowed, not what a court would impose. The more useful comparison for a typical person is whether the recording is lawful at all, and that depends on the consent rule above.

Dictating your own words is not recording a conversation, but recording a meeting is

Most of the statutes above cover communications between other people. If you dictate your own words into an app, you are not recording a conversation between two parties, and that generally falls outside them. The position changes when the recording captures other people's speech. A meeting recorded by an app on your computer, a conference call, or a phone call that you record are all recordings of other participants.

Apple's built-in call recording shows how a platform handles the notice. When you record a call on iPhone, ¹⁹ and Apple tells you to make sure the other person is willing to be recorded before you start. ²⁰ The feature is also not available everywhere. Apple lists 19 countries and regions where call recording on iPhone is not currently available, including the European Union. ²¹

For a reader who wants the Apple steps, our guide to Apple dictation privacy covers how Apple handles the audio that dictation produces. Recording a meeting in a tool that is not built for it raises the consent questions in the next section.

AI notetakers that join calls raise consent questions the host cannot always answer

An AI notetaker that joins a meeting records every participant, not only the person who installed it. That makes the consent question harder than with a personal recording. In a class action filed in August 2025, plaintiffs allege that Otter.ai's Otter Notebook service, by default, does not ask meeting attendees for permission to record. ²² The allegations have not been decided by a court as far as we could find, so treat them as claims, not findings.

Privacy terms add a second concern. Otter's privacy policy, effective June 16, 2026, lists training its AI technology on de-identified audio recordings among its purposes. ²³ A host who joins a meeting with a notetaker should check the tool's default settings, tell every participant that a notetaker is running, and get their agreement before the notetaker starts. Our question on whether it is legal to use an AI notetaker without telling everyone covers the practical checks. For meetings with clinical or client information, see our guide to AI medical scribes and how meeting transcription works.

The UK, EU and Canada regulate recording through privacy law as well as interception law

Outside the United States, two kinds of rule matter: the criminal law on interception, and the data protection law that applies to any recording that identifies a person. The two can apply to the same recording.

Canada. Section 184 of the Criminal Code makes wilful interception of a private communication an offence, and it exempts a person who has the consent of the originator or of the intended recipient. ²⁴ The maximum for the offence is five years. ¹⁷ A participant who records a call with that consent sits outside the offence. The section concerns interception, not how a recording is later stored or shared.

The UK. The Investigatory Powers Act 2016 makes it an offence to intentionally intercept a communication in the course of its transmission without lawful authority. ²⁵ The offence is written around interception during transmission. It does not address a participant recording their own call directly, so take UK legal advice on a specific recording. For data protection, the regulator's guidance says an organisation must include its lawful basis and its purposes for using personal information in its privacy information. ²⁶ If a business records calls, it needs to say why in its privacy notice.

The EU. Under the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, processing personal data is lawful only if one of the listed conditions applies. ²⁷ Consent is the first of those conditions. A recording that identifies a person is personal data, so the same test applies. EU member states also have their own criminal rules on recording, which this guide does not cover. For the specific questions about the UK and EU, see whether it is legal to record a phone call in the UK or EU.

The safe practice is to announce the recording and keep evidence of consent

The consent and notice routes in the statutes above all depend on the people in the call knowing it is being recorded. The Kearney court said that announcing a recording at the outset of a call matters to the outcome: "if a business informs a client or customer at the outset of a telephone call that the call is being recorded, the recording would not violate the applicable California statute." ²⁸ Connecticut's verbal notice route works on the same principle, with a notice that is itself recorded.

The practical steps follow from that:

1. Announce the recording before it starts, and name everyone who will hear it.
2. Ask each person to agree, and record the agreement as part of the call, so the consent is on the recording.
3. Stop if anyone objects, or move the discussion to a method that does not record.
4. Check the other end, because the stricter state's rule can apply to a call that crosses a state line.
5. Keep the recording and the notice for as long as you need them, and limit who can access them.

Dictation tools and meeting apps differ in how they handle this, so read a tool's own settings before you use it for recorded conversations. For workplace policies on recording and transcription, see our guide to enterprise dictation policies and the guide to Zoom, Teams and Google Meet transcription. To see what happens to recordings after they are made, read our guide to voice data retention, whether dictation apps train AI on your voice and whether companies listen to your voice recordings.

Several state statutes are not covered here because their text could not be retrieved

We could not open the current statute text for Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire or Pennsylvania while writing this guide. Lists published by other sites place some of these states among the all-party states, and they disagree about others. We have left them out rather than repeat those lists. If you need one of these states, read its current statute or take legal advice before relying on a list.

The statutes on this page are the ones that could be checked directly, and they show the main pattern: a one-party federal floor, several all-party states with different wording, a few states with notice or split rules, and a cross-border question that the courts answer case by case. Each rule has its own conditions, so the safe course for any recording that involves people in more than one state or country is to meet the strictest rule that applies.