US recording laws, state by state

Every row below is a summary of a statute, not a substitute for reading it, and where sources disagree the row says so rather than picking a side. We are not lawyers. If the answer matters, ask someone who can be held to their answer. The wider framing, including what happens when the people on a call are in different countries, is on recording laws.

The phrase almost everyone searches for is a misnomer, and it is worth correcting once. These statutes do not ask for two consents, they ask for all of them, which is a different thing entirely in a meeting of six people. The accurate term is all-party consent, and the rest of this page uses it.

Six states require every participant to consent outright: California, Florida, Maryland, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Washington.

Three more reach the same place by a different route, and the difference changes what you have to do. Massachusetts bans secret recording rather than unconsented recording, so open notice, not agreement, is the operative test. Illinois since 2014 requires the recording to be made "in a surreptitious manner" as an element of the offence, which narrows it substantially. Montana requires that everyone know, not that everyone agree, and one party's warning is enough for either party to record.

Then there are the split states, where the medium decides. Oregon is one-party on the phone and requires every in-person participant to be specifically informed. Nevada is the reverse, one-party in person and all-party on calls. Hawaii is one-party under its wiretap statute and all-party for sounds in a "private place", which is exactly where a meeting happens. Maine is the same shape. Connecticut is one-party criminally and restricted civilly. Delaware has two statutes in force that squarely contradict each other. Michigan's text reads all-party and its controlling appellate reading exempts participants.

Count those how you like and you get somewhere between eleven and fourteen. That is why the published lists disagree.

The disagreement is real rather than sloppy, and every cause of it is visible in the table below.

• Some states split by medium. Oregon, Nevada, Georgia, Missouri and Maine all answer differently depending on whether the conversation is in a room, on a phone or on a screen. A list with one column per state has to round all of that off.
• Some split between criminal and civil liability. Connecticut is one-party criminally, and its civil statute bars recording a private telephone call unless one of three named conditions is met. The same recording can be criminally lawful and civilly actionable.
• Some split between statutes rather than media. Hawaii is one-party under its wiretap act and all-party under a separate privacy offence covering private places. Delaware has two statutes that contradict each other, one all-party and one one-party, both in force.
• Some all-party statutes have been read down by courts. Michigan's statute reads all-party, but Sullivan v. Gray held a participant is not an "eavesdropper". The Michigan Supreme Court has never resolved it.
• Some statutes turn on secrecy rather than consent. Massachusetts, Illinois and Montana all do, and the practical instruction that follows is different from "get consent".
• One state's text and its controlling case say opposite things. Nevada's NRS 200.620 literally permits interception "with the prior consent of one of the parties", but Lane v. Allstate (Nev. 1998) read the omission of an express one-party clause as imposing an all-party rule on calls. Anyone reading the statute alone gets the wrong answer.
• Some statutes do not reach in-person conversation at all, which is different from permitting it. Indiana's wiretap act is defined over electronic communications; New Mexico's is tied to telephone and telegraph infrastructure. A "one-party" label papers over the distinction.
• Vermont has no wiretapping statute at all, so any classification of it is an inference rather than a reading of a rule.

Treat any single published count as a simplification. The rows are the answer; the count is not.

There is no federal rule settling which state's law applies, and courts have reached different results on similar facts. One line applies the law of the place where the injury occurred. Another protects the stricter state's residents: in Kearney v. Salomon Smith Barney, 39 Cal.4th 95 (2006), California held that § 632 "applies when a confidential communication takes place in part in California and in part in another state", and, critically, that the Georgia statute applied to the same calls as well. Both states' statutes reached the same conversation, which is what produced a conflict rather than a gap.

Florida shows the question genuinely unsettled, with a live intra-state split: Koch v. Kimball (Fla. 2d DCA 1998) held the interception occurs where the communication originates, the Second District overruled it en banc in Kountze (2008), and the Fifth District held itself bound by Koch in France v. France (2012) and certified conflict.

So the honest framing is that no rule guarantees which law applies, several may apply at once, and all-party notice is the only posture that satisfies every candidate. That is prudential guidance, not a rule of decision, and it should not be presented as one. In practice: if any participant may be in an all-party state, or you do not know where the participants are, get everyone's consent. For a recurring internal meeting, put it in the invite and say it once at the top of the call.

Most published guidance is written about telephone calls, and most readers are recording video meetings. Two things carry over imperfectly.

The audio is what brings a video call inside these statutes. The federal act and most state analogues are built on "oral communication" and "aural transfer", so a silent screen recording is generally outside them and a recording with audio is generally inside. This is the consensus practitioner reading rather than a controlling holding.

Some statutes classify a video call differently from a conversation in a room, and the rule changes with the classification. Illinois is the clearest case: after the 2014 rewrite the oral-conversation provision is all-party while the private-electronic-communication provision reads, by negative implication, as one-party, and a video conference is an electronic communication. That reading is contested and should be treated as contested.

One state answers directly rather than by analogy, and it is the strictest notice state. Oregon's ORS 165.535(1) defines "conversation" to include "a communication occurring through a video conferencing program", which puts a video meeting squarely inside the branch requiring every participant to be specifically informed. Where a state's rule splits by medium, a hybrid meeting can fall under both branches at once, and satisfying the stricter one covers both.

The consent rule is the criminal layer. A one-party answer does not mean an employer may deploy a recorder across a team, and it does not settle a call with someone in another state. Every row has a page of its own, with the statute, the penalty and what you have to say.

"Consent" is defined by each statute rather than by a universal standard, but three points are sourceable across the survey and they are the ones that decide how to write a sentence.

Notice plus continuing to speak is accepted as consent, and there is real federal authority for it. Griggs-Ryan v. Smith, 904 F.2d 112 (1st Cir. 1990), affirmed judgment for a landlady who had told a tenant repeatedly that she recorded all incoming calls, holding that his continuing to take them "manifests implied consent".

But the notice has to be definite. Deal v. Spears held that implied consent "is not established by simply informing someone of the possibility of monitoring", and Griggs-Ryan turned expressly on the warning being unqualified and repeated. So "this call may be recorded" is materially weaker than "I am recording this call". Write the definite form. Wisconsin's official annotation to § 968.31 names both elements plainly: meaningful notice, and nonetheless proceeding.

Consent has to come before the recording starts, and this is one of the few points that is uniform. The federal exception requires "prior" consent, as do the Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming and Maryland statutes. Washington's deemed-consent provision speaks of a conversation that "is about to be recorded". Kearney construes California's § 632 as prohibiting recording "without first informing all parties".

A script that satisfies all three, and what to do when someone says no, is on telling people you're recording.

Earkeep records continuously and puts no bot in the participant list and no banner on anyone else's screen, so nothing about it discloses itself. The obligation is entirely yours. It does not detect where the people in your meeting are, and it does not apply the right state's rule, because it has no way of knowing either.

What it can do is make the answer to an objection real. A pause from the live edge releases the microphone and the system audio stream, so your operating system's recording indicator goes dark and the person who asked can watch it happen. A calendar meeting can be marked never-record. A stretch of the day can be purged from the file afterwards, and because the transcript is a plain file on your own disk with no server copy, deleted means deleted.

None of that makes a recording lawful. It removes the excuse that there was nothing to press.

• Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Reporter's Recording Guide, per-state pages, maintained.
• 18 U.S.C. ch. 119, the federal wiretap act.
• Matthiesen, Wickert & Lehrer, Laws on Recording Conversations in All 50 States. Last updated February 2022, so used to corroborate citations rather than to establish current law.
• Congressional Research Service R41733, the state-by-state appendices.
• Kilpatrick 50-state wiretap chart, July 2024.