Call recording consent by state

Federal wiretap law is one-party. A person who is not acting for the government may record a call “where such person is a party to the communication or where one of the parties to the communication has given prior consent” (18 U.S.C. § 2511(2)(d)). A business recording its own sales or support calls is a party, so federal law alone never requires a warning.

States can be stricter, and 13 of them are for phone calls: every party must agree before the call is recorded. The tool looks up each participant's state, and if any one of them is all-party, the whole call is treated as all-party. It also flags the points that change with the call itself: California has one section for confidential calls (Penal Code § 632) and another for any call with a cell or cordless phone on it (§ 632.7), and two states write their statute around wire lines only.

Recording consent is a wiretap question, separate from the TCPA. The TCPA governs autodialed and prerecorded calls, texts and calling hours (see what TCPA compliance means and the quiet hours checker); a recording is still useful there, because it is a record of what was said and agreed on the call.

No federal rule picks one state's law for an interstate call. The Reporters Committee's guide puts the practical answer plainly: “When a call involves participants from different states, journalists should err on the side of caution and assume that the stricter state law will apply.” It adds why: “Some courts have held that the law of the state where the recording device is located applies, while other courts have held it is where the person being recorded is located.”

The leading California case shows how that plays out for a business. In Kearney v. Salomon Smith Barney, decided on 2006-07-13, the complaint alleged that “employees at the Atlanta-based branch of defendant Salomon Smith Barney … repeatedly have recorded telephone conversations with California clients without the clients’ knowledge or consent.” Georgia is one-party. The California Supreme Court held that California's all-party law applies to those calls and let the clients' request for an injunction go forward, noting that “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.” It declined damages for calls already recorded, because before the ruling a business could reasonably have been unsure which state's law applied. A business recording California callers today cannot point to the same doubt.

The takeaway for a team that calls nationwide is to set recording rules by the customer's state, not the office's, or to announce on every call. Two settings in a recording tool do that work: an announcement the caller hears, and recording that changes by the other party's state. The call recording software comparison reads both, vendor by vendor, and the power dialer comparison reads the sales dialers that stop recording on calls to all-party area codes.

Most all-party statutes do not say what consent looks like. The Reporters Committee's reading is that “It is generally legal to … record any type of conversation when the parties are warned of the recording and continue with the conversation. The consent of all parties is presumed in these instances.” Four sources are more specific, and the tool adds their steps to your script whenever one of these states is on the call.

Every row below is sourced. 11 statutes were read on the legislature's own site on 2026-10-22; for the rest, those sites could not be reached from here, so the row follows the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press's Reporter's Recording Guide, read the same day. The all-party list matches that guide's: eleven states for all conversations, plus Connecticut and Nevada for phone calls.

Every statute, case and guide the tool encodes, with the date it was read. Laws change and courts read them differently; this is a compliance aid, not legal advice.