All-party consent recording laws, state by state

Twelve US states require consent from every party to record a conversation. Here's each one — with the statute, the penalty, and the detail people get wrong.

Last updated 21 July 2026

Short answer: most of the US follows one-party consent — if you're in the conversation, your own consent is enough. Twelve states require consent from everyone. But “all-party consent” is a rough label that hides a lot of variation, which is why these deserve a page each.

The 12 states

“All-party consent” means several different things

Reading the twelve pages back to back, the label frays. Three states — Massachusetts, Montana and Washington — really turn on secrecy rather than consent: record in the open, with everyone aware, and there is no violation even without anyone saying “yes.” Oregon asks only that in-person participants be informed, not that they agree. Connecticut and (arguably) Delaware are hybrids that treat phone and in-person differently. Only a handful demand explicit, affirmative all-party consent in the strict sense.

What unites them is the safe practice, which is the same everywhere: announce the recording out loud, and get an audible acknowledgement. That single habit satisfies the strict-consent states, the secrecy states, and the notice states at once.

The states people argue about

Michigan

Michigan's eavesdropping statute (MCL 750.539c) reads as all-party, but since Sullivan v. Gray (1982) courts have recognised a participant exception: the statute bars recording “the private discourse of others,” which a participant recording their own conversation is not doing. Federal litigation created some procedural noise, but when the Michigan Supreme Court declined to answer a certified question in 2021, Sullivan was left intact. That's why Michigan appears on some all-party lists and not others — and why it isn't among our twelve.

Nevada

Nevada is a genuine hybrid. Its in-person statute (NRS 200.650) is explicitly one-party. Its telephone statute (NRS 200.620) is textually ambiguous, but the Nevada Supreme Court read it in Lane v. Allstate (1998) to require all-party consent for phone calls — reasoning that the legislature wrote a one-party carve-out for in-person conversations but pointedly didn't for calls. So lists that call Nevada “all-party” are describing its phone-call case law, not its statute.

When people are in different states

Here's the honest version, because it's routinely overstated. There is no settled nationwide rule that “the strictest state's law always wins.” What exists is Kearney v. Salomon Smith Barney (Cal. 2006), where California applied its own all-party law to protect a California resident on a call with a one-party state — but did so through a fact-specific choice-of-law analysis, not a blanket principle. It even applied the more permissive law to past monetary liability.

Where the recording is processed is a separate question

Everything above governs whether you may record. It says nothing about who gets to hold the recording afterwards — and for regulated professionals, that second question is often the bigger one. A recording can be perfectly lawful and still breach a confidentiality duty the moment it's uploaded to a third party.

That's the gap a local-first notetaker closes. Consent is on you either way; but with Oats, the recording never leaves the machine it was made on. See the guides for lawyers, therapists and consultants for how that plays out by profession.