Call recording laws by state

This page is general information about US call-recording law, written for business owners trying to understand the landscape. It is not legal advice, it is not a substitute for a lawyer, and it cannot account for your specific situation.

State statutes get amended and courts reinterpret them. Anything here can go out of date. If you are recording calls as a routine part of running your business — especially across state lines, and especially if recordings might end up in a dispute — have a lawyer in your state confirm your setup.

Last reviewed: 31 August 2026.

Federal law is the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which amended the Wiretap Act at 18 U.S.C. § 2511. Under § 2511(2)(d), a person may record a communication they are a party to, or where one party has given prior consent.

In plain terms: federally, if you're on the call, you may record it, and you don't have to tell the other person.

There is an important carve-out in the same subsection. The one-party exception does not apply where the recording is made "for the purpose of committing any criminal or tortious act." Recording to blackmail someone, or to commit a tort, is not protected no matter how many parties consented.

Federal law is a floor, not a ceiling. States are free to demand more, and thirteen or so of them do.

One-party consent — you may record a conversation you are part of, without informing anyone else. Your own participation is the consent. This is the federal rule and the rule in the large majority of states.

All-party consent — every participant must consent before the recording is lawful. This is usually called "two-party consent," which is a misleading name: on a three-way call in an all-party state, you need all three. "All-party" is the accurate term and the one used throughout this page.

The practical difference for a business is not subtle. Under one-party consent you can record silently. Under all-party consent you must obtain consent from everyone, every time — which in practice means an announcement at the start of the call.

These nine are consistently treated as all-party consent jurisdictions for telephone calls:

Two are worth singling out. Massachusetts is the strictest in the country: Ch. 272 § 99 turns on *secrecy* rather than consent, so recording without the other party's knowledge is the violation — and unlike most states there is no widely-recognised exception for recording a call you're on. Montana frames its rule as a notification requirement rather than a consent requirement, which amounts to the same practical obligation.

This is where published lists diverge, and why you'll see the count given as 11, 12, or 13 depending on the source. In these five the statute and the case law don't line up, or the rule differs by conversation type:

• Connecticut — the criminal eavesdropping statute is one-party, while a separate civil statute (Conn. Gen. Stat. § 52-570d) requires consent to record a telephone conversation and creates civil liability. So you can be exposed civilly without committing a crime. Usually listed as all-party; treat it that way.
• Delaware — the wiretap statute reads as all-party, but federal courts interpreting it have applied the one-party federal standard to participants. Genuinely unsettled.
• Michigan — the eavesdropping statute (MCL 750.539c) reads as all-party, but the Michigan Court of Appeals has held that a participant in a conversation is not an "eavesdropper" under it. Many practitioners treat Michigan as one-party in practice; the statute's plain text says otherwise.
• Nevada — differs by medium. Telephone calls are treated as all-party following NRS 200.620 and the Nevada Supreme Court's reading of it; in-person conversations are one-party.
• Oregon — the inverse of Nevada. In-person conversations require all-party consent under ORS 165.540; telephone calls are one-party.

The safe operating rule: if any participant is in one of these five, behave as though all-party consent applies. The cost of an announcement is nothing; the cost of being wrong is a criminal statute.

Most business calls that create a legal problem are interstate: you're in a one-party state, the customer is in an all-party state, and the two laws disagree.

There is no clean federal answer. Courts have split. Some apply the law of the state where the recording device sits, some the law of each party's location, some run a conflict-of-laws analysis. States with all-party statutes have shown willingness to apply their law to protect their own residents on inbound calls.

The practical consequence: if you take calls from more than one state, assume the strictest applicable law. For a business with a public phone number, you cannot know where a caller is before they speak, so the only defensible default is to announce recording on every call.

This is also why the announcement approach is near-universal in call centres. It isn't caution for its own sake — it's the only rule that survives not knowing who's calling.

The standard mechanism is an announcement at the start of the call — some version of "this call may be recorded" — followed by the other party continuing the conversation. Continuing after a clear disclosure is widely treated as implied consent.

For that to hold up, three things matter:

• It has to come first. A disclosure after several minutes of conversation doesn't retroactively cover what was already recorded. It belongs in the first utterance, before any back-and-forth.
• It has to be clear and audible. Rushed, buried, or spoken over the top of a greeting undermines the argument that consent was informed.
• The caller needs a real chance to object. If someone says they don't consent, the answer is to stop recording or end the call — not to continue and hope.

There is also a narrower business-use exemption in federal law for monitoring on equipment used in the ordinary course of business. It's real but far narrower than businesses assume, and it does not override a state all-party statute. Don't build your compliance on it.

Illegal recording is a criminal offence in most all-party states, not merely a civil wrong. Several classify it as a felony — Florida treats unlawful interception as a third-degree felony, and California, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Washington all attach criminal penalties.

Most of these statutes also create a private right of action with statutory damages, so an aggrieved party can sue whether or not a prosecutor ever gets involved. Statutory damages matter because the plaintiff doesn't have to prove they lost anything.

There's a second-order consequence that catches businesses out: an unlawfully-made recording is generally inadmissible, and can taint the evidence derived from it. Businesses that record calls specifically to protect themselves in disputes sometimes discover the recording is the one piece of evidence they can't use — and that making it exposed them to a counterclaim.