Last updated: September 12, 2026
Every statute quoted below was read on the California Legislature's own site. This page is not legal advice, and the wording your floor uses belongs to your counsel.
Whether you can record a call in California
California requires the consent of all parties before you record a confidential communication, under Penal Code 632. For a business that means announcing the recording at the front of every call a California caller is on. Violations carry a criminal fine, a civil claim of $5,000 per violation, and a recording nobody can use as evidence.
What Penal Code 632 says
Subdivision (a) punishes a person who, "intentionally and without the consent of all parties to a confidential communication, uses an electronic amplifying or recording device to eavesdrop upon or record the confidential communication," whether the parties are in a room together or on "a telegraph, telephone, or other device, except a radio." The penalty is a fine not exceeding $2,500 per violation, a county jail term of up to a year, a state prison term, or both, and a second conviction under 632 or a neighboring section lifts the fine ceiling to $10,000.
Two phrases do the work. "All parties" puts California in the all party bucket on every survey, including the state table on this site. "Confidential communication" is why the answer runs longer than a line.
Which calls count as confidential
Subdivision (c) defines a confidential communication as one "carried on in circumstances as may reasonably indicate that any party to the communication desires it to be confined to the parties thereto." It then carves out anything said in a public gathering, in an open proceeding, or "in any other circumstance in which the parties to the communication may reasonably expect that the communication may be overheard or recorded."
Read that last clause on its own and a business call looks like it falls straight through the hole, since somebody who sat through a phone tree and forty seconds of hold music has reason to think the call is handled at scale.
Then it turns around on you, because the clause measures what the parties may reasonably expect, and a caller's expectation is built out of what you told them. Somebody told nothing expected nothing. That fight is where most California recording cases live, and it runs on your own facts.
The line that takes a disclosed recording out of the section
Subdivision (b) is the part most summaries skip. It defines who counts as a "person" for the section, then excludes "an individual known by all parties to a confidential communication to be overhearing or recording the communication."
The compliance mechanism is sitting right there in the definitions. A recording everybody on the call knows about is outside the conduct 632 describes, which makes the announcement an operational requirement rather than a politeness.
Placement decides whether it does anything. The line has to land before anything worth recording gets said, which on most floors puts it in the greeting of every account script. Your recording disclosure script holds five versions and the placement rules for each, though which one is safe in California belongs to your lawyer. Get that in writing.
Cell phone calls have their own section
Section 632.7 covers communications involving a cellular or cordless telephone, and it prohibits anyone who, without the consent of all of the parties, "intercepts or receives and intentionally records" one of them. The penalty ladder matches 632, and the carve outs cover telephone companies and utilities doing maintenance, uses under a public utility tariff, and prison phone systems.
That section never uses the phrase confidential communication. On an inbound line where most callers are on a mobile, the statute covering the bulk of your traffic gives you no confidentiality argument to fall back on.
Whether 632.7 reaches a participant rather than only somebody tapping the line from outside is not answered by the statute text. Ask a California lawyer that one specifically.
What a violation costs
The exposure arrives in three shapes, and the one people show up worried about is the smallest. A criminal fine under 632(a) is capped, and the statute counts it per violation without saying a violation is one call.
Next comes the evidence. Under subdivision (d), evidence obtained by recording a confidential communication in violation of the section "is not admissible in any judicial, administrative, legislative, or other proceeding." Audio kept for a dispute and unplayable at the hearing was never worth the storage.
Third is the private right of action at 637.2, which covers the whole Invasion of Privacy chapter that 632 sits in. A person injured by a violation may sue for the greater of $5,000 per violation or three times actual damages, and the statute states plainly that having suffered actual damages "is not a necessary prerequisite" to the action.
That clause is the engine behind the class actions California recording law is known for, since a plaintiff never has to show a dollar of harm.
Say a floor takes 2,400 calls a month from California numbers and runs a quarter with the disclosure missing from one account's greeting. That is 7,200 calls, and at $5,000 apiece the statute puts $36 million on the table before anybody has argued anything. The arithmetic is not a forecast and no defense lawyer would let the figure stand, but it is where a complaint starts.
Frequently asked questions
Is California a two party consent state?
The category is more accurately called all party consent, and California belongs in it. Penal Code 632 requires the consent of all parties to a confidential communication, and 632.7 covers calls involving a cellular or cordless phone.
Do you have to announce that a call is recorded in California?
No script appears anywhere in the statute. What 632(b) does is exclude an individual known by all parties to be recording, which is why an announcement at the front of the call became standard practice. The wording goes to counsel.
What is the penalty for recording a call without consent in California?
Section 632(a) sets a fine of up to $2,500 per violation with a jail or prison term available, rising to $10,000 after a prior conviction. Separately, 637.2 lets the recorded person sue for the greater of $5,000 per violation or three times actual damages.
Does California law apply if my call center sits in another state?
Nobody can give you a settled answer, and courts have not resolved it the same way twice. Businesses taking calls from California numbers generally apply the California rule to them rather than guessing, which is worth confirming with counsel.
When a call center in another state takes a California call
An agent sits in Texas, where one participant's consent satisfies the statute, and the caller is in San Diego. Two rules are in play, and the statutes say nothing to each other about which one governs.
Courts have gone different directions, and no rule you can print in a table decides your version. What operators do is work to the stricter of the two, which here means running the California disclosure on everything rather than sorting callers by area code, a number that stopped locating anybody years ago. The decision goes to counsel, since the conservative practice is a posture rather than a legal conclusion.
Past that it stops being a legal question and becomes an operations one: whether the line got read. Say the wording is approved, the script is correct, and four percent of calls skip it anyway. On 2,400 California calls a month that is 96 calls where your written policy and your stored audio disagree, and a sample of two scored calls per agent per week finds none of them.
A required phrase is the kind of criterion software checks reliably against a transcript, with a timestamp on the moment it was read or the silence where it belonged. Anything turning on tone stays shakier, and no QA tool has an opinion on whether your wording is lawful in California. A call review runs six months of your own recordings against the disclosure your counsel approved and hands back every California call missing it, at a fixed pilot price.
Sources
Four sections of the California Penal Code, read on leginfo.legislature.ca.gov on 2026-09-12 and verified from primary text.
- Section 632, subdivisions (a) through (d): all party consent, the "person" definition excluding someone known by all parties to be recording, the confidential communication definition, and inadmissibility. Amended by Stats. 2016, Ch. 855 (AB 1671).
- The cellular and cordless provision at 632.7, with its carve outs. Amended by Stats. 2022, Ch. 27 (SB 1272).
- A civil action at 637.2, damages of the greater of $5,000 per violation or three times actual damages, and the clause making actual damages unnecessary. Amended by Stats. 2016, Ch. 855 (AB 1671).
- Chapter 1.5, Invasion of Privacy, sections 630 to 638.55, opened by the findings at 630. Added by Stats. 1967, Ch. 1509.
The rest:
- Whether 632.7 reaches a party to the call. A question of California case law. Routed to counsel.
- Choice of law on a call crossing a state line. Unsettled, unverified, routed to counsel.
- Consent standards for the other forty nine states and DC. Held on the state law page, where every row carries its review status.
- Rule based criteria scoring more reliably than tone. Third party, unverified.