Two-party consent states

This is general information about US call-recording law, not legal advice, and not a substitute for a lawyer who knows your situation. These statutes carry criminal penalties, they get amended, and courts reinterpret them. If you record calls as part of your business, have a lawyer in your state confirm your setup.

Last reviewed: 31 August 2026.

The common name is misleading. These statutes require consent from every participant, not from two of them. On a call with three people, all three must consent. On a conference call with eight, all eight.

"All-party consent" is the accurate term, and it's what lawyers use. "Two-party" persists because the typical call has two people on it, which makes the distinction invisible until the moment it matters — usually when someone conferences a third person in and the existing consent no longer covers the call.

A related trap: consent covers the conversation it was given for. Adding a participant, or continuing into a materially different conversation later, can mean the earlier consent no longer does the work.

Massachusetts deserves particular care. Ch. 272 § 99 prohibits *secret* recording rather than non-consensual recording, and it lacks the participant exception most states recognise. The practical effect is that recording a call the other party doesn't know about is the violation, full stop — the strictest position in the country.

These are why published lists disagree on the count. In each, the statute and the case law pull in different directions, or the rule changes by conversation type:

• Connecticut — the criminal eavesdropping statute is one-party, but Conn. Gen. Stat. § 52-570d separately requires consent to record a telephone conversation and creates civil liability. You can be sued without having committed a crime.
• Delaware — the wiretap statute reads all-party, but federal courts interpreting it have applied the one-party federal standard to participants. Genuinely unsettled.
• Michigan — MCL 750.539c reads as all-party, but the Michigan Court of Appeals has held that a participant is not an "eavesdropper" within its meaning. Many practitioners treat Michigan as one-party; the statute's text says otherwise, and that gap has never been closed by the legislature.
• Nevada — all-party for telephone calls under NRS 200.620 as interpreted by the state Supreme Court; one-party for in-person conversations.
• Oregon — the mirror image: all-party for in-person conversations under ORS 165.540, one-party for telephone calls.

The asymmetry between Nevada and Oregon is a good illustration of why "is this a two-party state?" is the wrong question. The right one is "what does this state require for *this kind* of conversation?"

In practice, an announcement at the start of the call, with the other party continuing the conversation afterwards. Continuing after a clear disclosure is widely treated as implied consent, and it's the mechanism essentially every call centre relies on.

For it to do its job:

1. It comes first. Before any substantive conversation — ideally the opening utterance. A disclosure two minutes in doesn't cover the first two minutes, and in Massachusetts those two minutes are the offence.
2. It's clear and audible. Rushed or buried under a greeting weakens the argument that consent was informed.
3. Objection is honoured. If someone says no, stop recording or end the call. Continuing regardless converts a defensible position into a knowing violation.
4. Re-consent when the call changes. Adding a participant means the new person hasn't consented to anything.

The federal ordinary-course-of-business exemption for monitoring on business equipment is narrower than most businesses assume and does not override a state all-party statute. Don't rely on it as your compliance strategy.

These aren't regulatory fines. In most all-party states unlawful recording is a criminal offence, and several treat it as a felony — Florida classifies unlawful interception as a third-degree felony, and California, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Washington all attach criminal liability.

Most of these statutes also create a private right of action with statutory damages. That matters more than it first appears: statutory damages mean the person suing doesn't have to prove they lost anything. The violation itself is the damage, which makes these claims straightforward to bring and awkward to defend.

And then the outcome businesses least expect: an unlawfully-made recording is generally inadmissible, and can taint evidence derived from it. A business that records calls specifically to protect itself in disputes can find the recording is the one thing it can't put in front of a court — while having handed the other side a counterclaim.

You almost certainly do, and you can't know where a caller is before they speak.

Courts have split on which state's law governs an interstate call, and all-party states have shown willingness to apply their law to protect residents on inbound calls. Waiting to find out which view a court takes is not a strategy.

The workable rule is to assume the strictest law that could apply. For a business with a public number that means announcing on every call, every time — the same thing the nine settled states would require if every caller were local. Once the announcement is automatic, the question of which state the caller is in stops mattering, which is the real reason to do it.