← Back to Call Recording Consent Check
The federal Wiretap Act (18 U.S.C. § 2511(2)(d)) only ever set a floor: a person who is a party to a call — or who has the prior consent of one party — may record it, unless the recording is for a criminal or tortious purpose. That is a one-party-consent rule, and it is the default everywhere in the US unless a state has legislated something stricter. Fourteen states and DC did: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Washington all require every party's consent before a call may be recorded — usually enacted as part of a broader eavesdropping or wiretapping statute concerned with privacy in one's own communications generally, not call recording specifically.
Most of the fourteen are unambiguous in their own statute text. Two are not, and this tool names both rather than smoothing them into a clean answer:
| State | What the statute text says | How it is actually applied |
|---|---|---|
| Nevada | Reads as one-party consent (Nev. Rev. Stat. § 200.620) | The Nevada Supreme Court in Lane v. Allstate Ins. Co., 969 P.2d 938 (Nev. 1998) interpreted it to require all-party consent — this tool follows the applied reading, not the bare text |
| Michigan | Mich. Comp. Laws § 750.539c, arguably one-party for a participant recording their own call | Michigan appellate decisions have gone the other way for a recording by someone not a party to the call. This tool lists Michigan as all-party out of caution and calls it the least certain classification in the table |
No federal court has resolved this uniformly for every pairing of states, and this tool does not pretend otherwise. The commonly recommended, conservative practice is to apply the stricter rule whenever either party is in an all-party state — and at least one state's highest court has done exactly that: Kearney v. Salomon Smith Barney, Inc., 39 Cal. 4th 95 (2006) applied California's all-party rule to protect California call recipients even though the recording company was based out of state. That is the reasoning this tool's conservative guidance rests on — a real precedent for the direction it recommends, not a guarantee that every state pair resolves the same way.
| Check | Source | Out of scope |
|---|---|---|
| Per-state default classification | A fixed table of each state's own wiretapping/eavesdropping statute (all-party states cite the specific section; one-party states point to the federal baseline) | Verifying the statute hasn't been amended since this table was built — state law changes without notice |
| Interstate combining rule | Conservative all-party guidance whenever either state requires it, citing the Kearney precedent for why | A guarantee that every state pair resolves this way in every court — no such uniform rule exists |
| Disclosure script | A ready-to-read call-opening line matching the determined requirement | Industry-specific notice rules (some insurance and financial-services regulators require their own disclosure) and any language beyond English |
Also out of scope entirely: in-person conversations (several all-party states, Oregon among them, treat these differently from phone or electronic calls), 911 and emergency calls, law-enforcement recording, and a parent's vicarious consent to record a minor child's calls.
Check a new sales region or call-routing rule before it ships:
node ventures/call-recording-consent-check/cli.mjs check Texas California node ventures/call-recording-consent-check/cli.mjs script all-party --company "Acme Inc." --purpose "training purposes"
check exits 1 when the pair requires all-party consent, so
it can gate a new market's onboarding checklist the same way any other
compliance CLI check does.
The federal Wiretap Act only ever set a floor — one party's consent is enough unless the recording is for a criminal or tortious purpose — and left states free to require more. Fourteen states and DC did, usually framed around a broader right to privacy in one's own communications rather than call recording specifically; the other thirty-six left the federal floor as their own rule.
Two, named explicitly in this tool's own table rather than smoothed over. Nevada's statute reads as one-party consent, but the Nevada Supreme Court in Lane v. Allstate Ins. Co. (1998) interpreted it to require all-party consent, and it is enforced that way. Michigan's statute text is read by some courts as one-party for a participant recording their own call, while other Michigan appellate decisions have gone the other way for a non-party's recording — this table lists Michigan as all-party out of caution, and says so.
No federal court has settled this uniformly for every state pair. The commonly recommended, conservative practice is to apply the stricter (all-party) rule whenever either party is in an all-party state, and at least one state supreme court has done exactly that for a call reaching its own residents (Kearney v. Salomon Smith Barney, Inc., 39 Cal. 4th 95 (2006)). This tool follows that conservative reading rather than assuming the recording party's own state always controls.
In-person conversations (several all-party states, Oregon among them, treat these differently from phone or electronic calls), 911 and emergency calls, law-enforcement recording, a parent's vicarious consent to record a minor child's calls, and any industry-specific notice rule (some insurance and financial-services regulators require their own disclosure separate from the wiretap statute). It also does not verify that a state's statute hasn't been amended since this table was built.