Recording Cold Calls: Which States Require Two-Party Consent and What That Means for Your QA Process

The Federal Floor Every State Builds On

Recording a phone call is not governed by the TCPA the way texting and cold calling consent are. It is governed by state wiretap statutes, and federal law only sets the floor those statutes build on. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act, 18 U.S.C. 2511(2)(d), permits a call to be recorded with the consent of just one party to the conversation, meaning the person doing the recording can legally consent on their own behalf under federal law alone.

States are free to require more than that floor, and many do. A state that adopts an all-party consent standard requires every person on the call to agree to being recorded, not just the person holding the recorder, a materially higher bar than the federal minimum and the one a multi-state calling operation actually has to clear.

The States Where Recording Requires Everyone’s Consent

The states most consistently cited across legal sources as requiring all-party consent are California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Washington. Delaware, Nevada, and Oregon show up on some current lists but not all of them, which means commonly cited lists run 10 to 13 states depending on classification, on which legal aggregator compiled the list, and when.

That range is itself a warning sign for anyone treating this as a fixed, memorizable list. Wiretap statutes get amended, reinterpreted by courts, and recompiled by different legal publishers on different schedules, so a caller relying on a single source’s count from a year or two ago is working from a list that may already be stale in one direction or the other.

Illinois’ Two-Party Law Has Already Been Struck Down Once

Illinois is the clearest example of why this area of law does not sit still. Its two-party consent statute was held unconstitutional in 2014, which briefly removed Illinois from the all-party consent list entirely, and the state legislature subsequently re-enacted the law, putting Illinois back on the list under a revised version of the statute.

A caller who learned the rules once and never revisited them would have gotten Illinois wrong at some point during that sequence, regardless of which direction they assumed. That is the specific risk a static compliance checklist creates in a state whose own law has already flipped once.

Why a Call Crossing State Lines Complicates the Rule

Most cold calling operations are not calling within a single state, and that is where the rule gets harder to apply cleanly. A California Supreme Court decision, Kearney v. Salomon Smith Barney, held that an all-party consent state’s law can govern a call whenever any party to that call is physically located in that state, even if the person doing the recording is sitting in a one-party consent state at the time.

That ruling is the reason a caller cannot simply check where their own office sits and call it settled. If the seller on the other end of the line is in an all-party consent state, that state’s stricter rule can reach the call regardless of where the caller is dialing from.

Building a QA Process That Doesn’t Assume One Rule Fits Every Call

Given that uncertainty, the practically safe rule for a multi-state calling operation is to treat every call as requiring all-party consent unless every state on the line has been confirmed as one-party. That single standing rule removes the need to look up a seller’s state on every dial and quietly protects against the Kearney exposure described above.

A recorded-call QA process built on that standard also has to record consent itself, not just the call, since a training-library recording made without the right consent creates the same exposure the underlying call rule was built to prevent. VA Horizon’s cold-calling VAs are trained to operate inside whichever consent standard actually applies to a given seller, not a single assumed default, and the in-house SDR who qualifies each interested seller carries that same standard into every follow-up call.

Sources

The external data in this article draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.

• Digital Media Law Project (Berkman Klein Center), "Recording Phone Calls and Conversations"
• Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton LLP, "Wiretap Laws in the United States"

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