Illinois Call Recording Law: 720 ILCS 5/14

Last updated: September 12, 2026

Whether you can record a call in Illinois

Illinois requires the consent of every party before you record a private conversation, under an eavesdropping statute the legislature rewrote in Public Act 98-1142, effective December 30, 2014. A surreptitious recording made without that consent is a felony. Summaries written before that date describe a law Illinois no longer has.

The statute that is actually in force

Four sections of Article 14 of the Criminal Code end with the same source line. Definitions at 720 ILCS 5/14-1, the offense at 14-2, the sentence at 14-4, and the inadmissibility rule at 14-5 all trace to Public Act 98-1142, effective December 30, 2014.

Illinois ended up with that act because the earlier eavesdropping statute was held unconstitutional for reaching too far, and the legislature wrote a replacement rather than amending around the problem. A prohibition that never asked whether a conversation was private got traded for one that asks twice, and a good number of published summaries still answer the older question.

This page was assembled by a software company reading statutes on the General Assembly's own site. Treat it as a map of what to put to your lawyer rather than legal advice.

What makes a conversation private

Subsection 14-1(d) defines a private conversation as "any oral communication between 2 or more persons, whether in person or transmitted between the parties by wire or other means, when one or more of the parties intended the communication to be of a private nature under circumstances reasonably justifying that expectation." A following sentence adds that a reasonable expectation "shall include any expectation recognized by law," naming privilege and constitutional rights among the sources.

Two pieces carry the weight. One party is enough, so a caller's intent alone can make a call private, and that intent has to be reasonable under the circumstances, which is the test the rewrite put ahead of everything else.

Arguing that a caller who sat through a phone tree and two minutes of hold music expected to be handled at scale is a real argument, and a bad one to bet a felony charge on when the same call might open with a patient describing a symptom.

Surreptitious is the word that decides it

The offense that reaches a working call floor sits in paragraph 2 of 14-2(a). A person commits eavesdropping when he or she knowingly and intentionally "uses an eavesdropping device, in a surreptitious manner, for the purpose of transmitting or recording all or any part of any private conversation to which he or she is a party unless he or she does so with the consent of all other parties."

Your agent is a party to the call, so that paragraph is the one your floor lives under. Illinois then defines the qualifier instead of leaving it to argument. Under 14-1(g), surreptitious means "obtained or made by stealth or deception, or executed through secrecy or concealment."

A recording the caller was told about at the top of the call is none of those things. The compliance mechanism is the announcement, sitting in the definitions section where anybody skimming for the penalty skips straight past it.

Worth knowing where the exposure lands. An eavesdropper under 14-1(b) expressly includes "any party to a private conversation," and 14-1(c) makes a principal of anyone who knowingly derives a benefit or information from an illegal use. Paragraph 5 of 14-2(a) adds a separate offense for using or disclosing what you know came from an unlawful recording.

What a violation costs

Eavesdropping is a Class 4 felony for a first offense and a Class 3 felony after that. Where the recorded person is a law enforcement officer, a prosecutor, or a judge on duty, 14-4(b) moves a first offense to Class 3 and repeat conduct to Class 2.

Then the audio stops working as evidence. Section 14-5 makes anything obtained in violation of the article inadmissible in any civil or criminal trial and in any administrative, legislative, or grand jury proceeding, unless all parties consent to its admission. Civil remedies at 14-6 run to an injunction, all actual damages, and any punitive damages a court or jury awards, and they reach a landlord or a common carrier by wire that knowingly permits the eavesdropping.

No fixed per violation figure appears in the section, which makes Illinois harder to model on a spreadsheet than states that print a dollar amount. Ask counsel how punitive damages run in your county before treating a missing number as good news, and use the state by state map for everywhere else your floor takes calls.

The business exemptions are narrower than the phrase suggests

Section 14-3 lists the exemptions, and one was written for telephone work. Subsection (j) covers a business engaged in marketing or opinion research, or in telephone solicitation, monitoring for service quality control, employee training, or internal research, "with the consent of at least one person who is an active party" to the call.

That reads like a call center QA exemption until you total up what rides along with it. Nothing acquired under (j) may go to law enforcement, into any administrative or judicial proceeding, or to any third party. Employees get written notice, prominent signage in the workplace, and unmonitored personal lines. A call that turns out to be something other than solicitation or research has to be dropped and the recording destroyed.

The definition of telephone solicitation in (j) reaches live operators "assisting in the use of goods or services," broad enough that a support line might read itself in. Maybe. A floor taking that reading also takes the third party disclosure ban, which knocks out the white label client report an outsourced program exists to produce.

Subsection (f) is narrower still, exempting incoming calls on lines publicly advertised as consumer hotlines by food and drug manufacturers or retailers, on the condition that the recordings are destroyed or handed to local law enforcement within 24 hours. Blow the deadline and the subsection takes the immunity back.

Frequently asked questions

All party consent is the more accurate name for the category, and Illinois belongs in it. A participant who records a private conversation surreptitiously needs the consent of every other party on the call.

Do you have to tell someone you are recording in Illinois?

No script appears in the statute and the word announcement never shows up. The offense is limited to recordings made in a surreptitious manner, which 14-1(g) defines as made by stealth or deception or executed through secrecy or concealment. Your wording goes to counsel.

Is recording a phone call in Illinois a felony?

Yes, where the conduct meets the elements. Section 14-4 sets a first offense at a Class 4 felony and repeat conduct at a Class 3 felony.

Does the Illinois business exemption cover a customer service line?

Subsection 14-3(j) was written for marketing or opinion research and telephone solicitation, though its definition stretches to assisting in the use of goods or services. Whether your line fits is a question for a lawyer, and the conditions riding on it make it a poor foundation for a QA program either way.

Proving the announcement landed on a specific call

Once counsel approves the wording, the legal question closes and an operations question opens in its place. Illinois turns on whether a particular recording was made surreptitiously, so your defense is a claim about one call rather than a claim about your policy.

Say a floor takes 1,800 Illinois calls a month with the disclosure sitting correctly in the account script for every client. Three percent skip it anyway, from a warm transfer, a dropped greeting, or an agent talking over the caller. That leaves 54 recordings a month in storage with nothing in them showing the caller was told, and a sample of two scored calls per agent per week will not surface one of them.

A required phrase near the front of a call is the kind of criterion software checks reliably, because the transcript either carries the words or it does not and the evidence is a timestamp rather than an opinion. Scoring how the agent sounded is shakier ground, and no QA tool has a view on whether your wording satisfies Illinois. Point a call review at your own recordings and you get back every call where the approved line is missing, at a fixed pilot price. Mark that a critical fail and the gap becomes a number somebody owns, which is about where software stops and the disclosure script and an Illinois lawyer take over.

Sources

Six sections of the Illinois Compiled Statutes, read on ilga.gov on 2026-09-12 and quoted from primary text. Four of them were retrieved a second time the same day and saved to this article's evidence folder, which confirmed the Public Act source lines, the surreptitious element in 14-2, the felony classes in 14-4, and the civil remedies in 14-6. Reading them again means using the current Legislation/ILCS/FullText path on that site, because the General Assembly moved its statute URLs and the older fulltext.asp path now answers 403.

720 ILCS 5/14-1, definitions, including private conversation, surreptitious, eavesdropper, and principal. Source line P.A. 98-1142, eff. 12-30-14.
720 ILCS 5/14-2, elements of the offense, covering a party to the call and the use or disclosure provision. Source line P.A. 98-1142, eff. 12-30-14; 99-352, eff. 1-1-16.
720 ILCS 5/14-3, exemptions, including telephone solicitation and research at (j) and consumer hotlines at (f). Source line P.A. 104-245, eff. 1-1-26.
720 ILCS 5/14-4, sentence, Class 4 and Class 3 felony levels with enhancements. Source line P.A. 98-1142, eff. 12-30-14.
720 ILCS 5/14-5, evidence inadmissible, with the all party consent exception. Source line P.A. 98-1142, eff. 12-30-14.
720 ILCS 5/14-6, civil remedies, injunction plus actual and punitive damages. Source line P.A. 98-268, eff. 1-1-14.

The rest:

Constitutional history behind P.A. 98-1142. The holding, the court, and the year are unverified and routed to counsel.
Whether an inbound support line fits the 14-3(j) definition of telephone solicitation. Unsettled on the statute text alone.
Consent standards for other states. Held on the state law page, with each row's review status.
Rule based criteria scoring more reliably than tone. Third party, unverified.