Nine states are strict. The rest of the list is an argument.

Search for a list of all-party consent states and you will find one. Search again and you will find a different one.

The counts run from nine to fifteen. The lists are not sloppy. They disagree because the underlying law does.

Only nine states are settled. Everything past that is a judgment call somebody made.

The nine that are not in dispute

These states require every participant to consent, by statute, across the core recording situations. Every list contains all nine.

State	Statute
California	Penal Code § 632
Florida	Fla. Stat. § 934.03
Illinois	720 ILCS 5/14-2
Maryland	Cts. & Jud. Proc. § 10-402
Massachusetts	Gen. Laws ch. 272 § 99
Montana	Mont. Code Ann. § 45-8-213
New Hampshire	N.H. Rev. Stat. § 570-A:2
Pennsylvania	18 Pa. Cons. Stat. §§ 5703–5704
Washington	Wash. Rev. Code § 9.73.030

Three of these carry details worth knowing before you rely on the label.

Massachusetts is the strictest of the nine. Its statute bans secret recording without any requirement that the conversation be confidential. Recording openly but without agreement can still violate it.

Pennsylvania is the most dangerous to get wrong. Unauthorized interception is a third-degree felony, and its courts have applied the state rule to calls where only one participant was in Pennsylvania.

Illinois is narrower than its reputation. The old eavesdropping statute was struck down as unconstitutional in 2014 and the replacement carries broad exceptions, including for recording police and public officials in public.

The states that split by situation

This is where the lists come apart. Each of these applies all-party rules to some kinds of communication and one-party rules to others, so whether it belongs on the list depends on which situation you had in mind.

Connecticut — one-party under the criminal statute, but civil liability attaches to recording phone calls without all-party consent. For a business it functions as all-party; for a person recording a conversation in a room, it does not.

Oregon — the reverse. All-party for in-person oral conversations under ORS § 165.540, one-party for phone calls.

Nevada — all-party for phone calls, read into NRS § 200.620 by the state supreme court in Lane v. Allstate (1998), and a felony to get wrong. But in-person conversations run on the opposite rule: NRS § 200.650 bars surreptitious recording of a private conversation unless authorized by one of the people in it, so a participant’s own consent is enough. Nevadans who know their state as a two-party state are usually thinking of the phone rule.

Delaware — two statutes that point opposite directions. The wiretap act contains a one-party exception; the privacy statute does not.

Hawaii and Maine — context-dependent in the same manner, which is why they appear on some lists and not others.

Vermont has no statute on the subject at all. The federal one-party baseline applies by default, but its courts have recognized strong privacy protections and the question has never been settled, so cautious guides list it as all-party.

Michigan, which almost everyone gets wrong

Michigan’s eavesdropping statute reads as an all-party rule. That is why it appears on so many lists.

But the Michigan Court of Appeals held in Sullivan v. Gray (1982) that “eavesdrop” refers to third-party interception, meaning a participant may lawfully record their own conversation. No Michigan Supreme Court decision has overruled it, and a federal court reaffirmed the participant exception in 2026.

So Michigan is functionally one-party. Some compliance guides still list it as all-party, which is defensible advice for a company and misleading as a statement of law.

Everything else

The remaining states and the District of Columbia follow the federal one-party baseline under 18 U.S.C. § 2511(2)(d): if you are in the conversation, your own consent is enough.

That includes most of the largest states — New York, Texas, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, New Jersey. There is more on the federal rule and where it comes from in a separate article.

The part no list resolves

When participants are in different states, which rule governs is genuinely unsettled. Courts have decided it both ways, and the choice-of-law question is often litigated after the fact rather than answered in advance.

The working assumption everyone uses is the strictest applicable rule. It is not a rule of law so much as the only assumption that cannot backfire.

One more thing the lists have started to matter for: automated recorders are not treated differently. The statutes are written around the act of recording, not around who pressed the button, and putative class actions against AI note-taking tools were filed through 2026 on exactly that theory.

What this means in practice

If you are in one of the nine, get agreement before recording starts, out loud, at the beginning. That is what the statutes are asking for and it is not complicated to do.

If you are in a split state, work out whether your situation is a phone call or a conversation in a room, because that is the question your state’s law actually turns on.

And if you are in one of the thirty-odd one-party states, the rule is simply whether you were in the conversation.

Where the app sits in this

TalkSafe is built for conversations you are part of, which is the situation the federal baseline and the one-party states permit.

A notification stays visible for as long as a recording runs and it cannot be turned off. There is no hidden mode. In an all-party state that notification is not a substitute for consent — you still have to ask — but it does mean the app never puts you on the wrong side of the line between recording and intercepting, which is the line that carries prison time in every state on this page.

General information, not legal advice. State law changes and several of the classifications above are contested. For a specific situation, consult a lawyer in your state.