Call Recording Consent Laws: A 50-State Dataset

• Plan for all-party callers.More than a third of U.S. residents live in a state that requires everyone’s consent. If you record calls from customers in many states, a notice at the start of the call (“this call may be recorded”) is the common way businesses handle it.
• A call can carry two states’ laws.Courts have applied the stricter state’s rule to calls placed into that state; the California Supreme Court did so in Kearney v. Salomon Smith Barney.
• Treat the unsettled states with care. In Delaware and Michigan the statutes or court rulings point both ways, and many businesses follow the all-party rule there.
• Ask your answering service. Find out whether calls on your account are recorded, how long recordings are kept, who can listen, and what callers hear about it. Questions to ask about recording and consent.

This dataset is general information, not legal advice. Ask a lawyer licensed in your state about your situation.

Our law table classifies each state by the rule that applies when a participant records a phone call: one-party (one person on the call may consent, as under federal law, 18 U.S.C. § 2511(2)(d)), all-party (everyone on the call must consent) or unsettled (statutes or court rulings conflict). It was compiled from the state statutes, the court decisions that interpret them and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP) Reporter’s Recording Guide, and checked on October 29, 2026. Where a state has different rules for phone calls and in-person conversations, the phone-call rule is used.

Population is the Census Bureau’s Vintage 2025 resident population estimate for July 1, 2025. We added up the residents of the states in each group and divided by the U.S. total (341,784,857, the sum of the 50 states and DC).

Before publishing we re-read the RCFP guide’s summary for every state and the official statute text for the all-party states whose legislature websites serve it, and checked every population figure against the Census Bureau’s published table. We plan a full recheck of every state each year; the next is due by October 2027.

Limits

• Residents are not callers. The shares describe where people live, not where your calls come from.
• Each rule has exceptions, such as recorded notices, warning tones, an expectation of privacy, or law enforcement. Some states protect cellphone calls differently. See the notes on the full table.
• Laws change through new statutes and court rulings between our yearly checks.
• Recording rules are only one part of call compliance. Health privacy, telemarketing and data retention rules are separate.
• The RCFP guide is a secondary source and many of its state pages are several years old, so statutes and later court rulings take precedence in our table.

• Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Reporter's Recording Guide, state pages, re-read November 12, 2026. www.rcfp.org/reporters-recording-guide/
• 18 U.S.C. § 2511 (federal one-party rule), Legal Information Institute, current. www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2511
• U.S. Census Bureau, state population totals, Vintage 2025, July 1, 2025. www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/popest/2020s-state-total.html

Statute and case citations for each state are in the CSV and on the full table, each with its source link.