Is Vermont a one-party consent state?

There is no Vermont statute. The Congressional Research Service survey of state wiretap law lists every state's interception statute, consent rule and civil-liability provision in its appendices, and Vermont appears in none of them, showing up only in the computer-crime appendix. RCFP's Vermont page cites only the federal provisions plus 13 V.S.A. § 2605, which is the voyeurism offence rather than a consent statute. The Kilpatrick chart states flatly that "Vermont has not enacted a specific statute to address consent for recording conversations".

Three things actually govern instead.

Federal law, which reaches wire, oral and electronic communications and protects an oral communication only where the speaker exhibits a justified expectation of non-interception. As a party you may record without notifying anyone, unless the purpose is criminal or tortious.

Common-law intrusion upon seclusion, which Vermont recognises as "a substantial, intentional intrusion upon the solitude or seclusion of another, or upon his private affairs or concerns, which would be highly offensive to a reasonable person", following Restatement (Second) of Torts § 652B, traced to Hodgdon v. Mt. Mansfield Co. (1992) and applied in Denton v. Chittenden Bank (1994). This is the live exposure for a private recorder in Vermont, and no Vermont case applying it to a participant recording a conversation they are part of was found, so its practical reach is genuinely uncertain.

Article 11 of the Vermont Constitution under State v. Geraw (2002), which asked whether Vermonters must accept the risk that police interviews in the privacy of their home are being secretly recorded without a warrant, and held Article 11 prohibits it. Geraw is a state-action case about police conduct, so it does not by itself make a private party's secret recording unlawful. It does supply one caution worth carrying, quoted in a secondary source: "Any Vermonter who sits around the kitchen table conversing as defendant did here has a reasonable right to expect that he or she is not being secretly monitored or recorded."

There is no Vermont criminal penalty for non-consensual recording of a conversation. The penalties printed on RCFP's Vermont page are the federal ones: up to five years, a fine, or both, under 18 U.S.C. § 2511(4)(a); and on the civil side the § 2520 formula of actual damages plus profits, $100 a day, or $10,000, whichever is greater, plus punitive damages, fees and costs.

Separately, 13 V.S.A. § 2605 criminalises recording intimate areas or sexual acts where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy. A secondary source gives up to two years and $1,000 for a first offence and up to three years and $5,000 for a subsequent one, unconfirmed against the statute.

Being one of the people in the conversation answers the question for Vermont. It does not answer it for whoever is on the other end. No rule settles which state's law applies when the participants are in different places, more than one may apply at once, and courts have reached opposite results on comparable facts. If anyone on the call might be in an all-party state, the safe posture is theirs rather than yours. The general problem is on the US overview.

Nothing in Vermont law requires you to say anything, which is a different thing from it being a good idea. The reason to announce it anyway is the person on the other end of the call, who may be somewhere stricter, and the reason to ask rather than tell is that it puts an answer on the record instead of an assumption.

I'm recording this for notes, stored on my machine only. Any objection?

Then leave a beat. Longer versions, and what to do when someone says no, are on telling people you're recording.

Earkeep records continuously and announces itself to nobody: no bot in the participant list, no banner on anyone else's screen. In a one-party state that is legally unremarkable, and it is still the reason nobody in the room knows unless you say so.

The controls exist for when somebody would rather you didn't. A pause from the live edge releases the microphone and the system audio stream, so your operating system's own recording indicator goes dark and the person who asked can watch it happen rather than take your word for it. A meeting on a connected calendar can be marked never-record. And a stretch of the day, or a saved meeting with its transcript, can be purged: the lines come out of the file on your own disk and nothing is written in their place, with no server copy to reconcile against because there is no server.

None of that makes a recording lawful anywhere, and the audio never leaving your device is not an answer to a consent statute. It is a good answer to "where does this go", which is usually the question the room actually has.

• RCFP, Reporter's Recording Guide: Vermont
• Congressional Research Service R41733
• State v. Geraw, 173 Vt. 350 (2002)
• Without My Consent, Vermont common law
• Denton v. Chittenden Bank (Vt. 1994)
• Kilpatrick 50-state wiretap chart, July 2024
• 18 U.S.C. § 2511

• US recording laws, state by state: the federal baseline, the cross-border problem, and all 51 jurisdictions.
• Telling people you're recording: the scripts, and the three ways to stop.
• Private by design: why the audio never leaves your computer.

This page is legal information, not legal advice. It summarises statutes and cases rather than replacing them, and we are not lawyers. If the answer matters, ask someone who can be held to their answer.