Compliance
Call Recording Laws by State
Updated August 2026 · 3 min read
The short version
Federal law lets a call be recorded if one participant agrees. Some states go further and require everyone on the call to agree. If your business line records — and most do, whether a person or an AI answers — the stricter of the two rules is the one you have to satisfy.
The two regimes
One-party consent means a single participant's agreement is enough. Because your business is a party to its own inbound calls, it supplies that consent itself and can record without telling the caller.
All-party consent means every participant has to agree. Your own participation is no longer sufficient — the caller has to be told and has to stay on the line. In practice that means an announcement at the start of the call.
The federal floor is one-party consent under 18 U.S.C. § 2511, and states are free to be stricter. Of the 5 states covered below, 3 are.
States covered so far
| State | Standard | Governing law |
|---|---|---|
| California | All-party consent | Cal. Penal Code § 632(a), with § 632.7 covering calls that involve a cellphone or cordless phone |
| Florida | All-party consent | Fla. Stat. § 934.03(2)(d), with civil remedies under Fla. Stat. § 934.10 |
| Illinois | All-party consent | 720 Ill. Comp. Stat. 5/14-1 and 5/14-2 |
| Texas | One-party consent | Tex. Penal Code § 16.02, with civil remedies under Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 123.004 |
| New York | One-party consent | N.Y. Penal Law §§ 250.00 and 250.05 |
- California — all-party consent
- Florida — all-party consent
- Illinois — all-party consent
- Texas — one-party consent
- New York — one-party consent
We are adding states as we go rather than publishing fifty thin pages at once — each one is written from the statute for that state, not copied from the last.
Every call answered, and the notice played every time
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Start your 14-day free trialWhat it means for a business phone line
Two practical points get missed. First, the caller's location matters, not just yours: a call from an all-party state into a one-party state can pull the stricter rule in, so businesses that take out-of-state calls often announce recording everywhere. Second, a notice in your website privacy policy is not consent — the caller never read it. It has to happen on the call.
If an AI answers your phone, none of this changes. The statutes govern the recording, not who is speaking. VoxiQa plays a recording-and-AI disclosure before the greeting on every call, on by default and editable from the dashboard.
Not legal advice
VoxiQa builds phone software, not legal opinions. This page summarises publicly available state law as described in the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press recording guide, retrieved August 2026. Statutes change, courts reinterpret them, and exceptions apply that a summary cannot capture. Confirm your own obligations with a licensed attorney in your state before you rely on any of it.