Washington Call Recording Law: RCW 9.73.030

Last updated: September 12, 2026

Washington requires the consent of all participants before you record a private call, under RCW 9.73.030. Subsection 3 of that same section names a route to obtaining it: one party announces that the call is about to be recorded, and the announcement itself has to be recorded. Violations carry criminal and civil exposure.

Every quote below came off the Washington Legislature's own site on 2026-09-12. Treat the page as background rather than legal advice, because the wording that ends up in an account script has to come from your lawyer.

The announcement that has to be in the file

Plenty of all party statutes require consent and leave you to work out what counts as getting it. Washington writes a method into the text.

Subsection 3 says that where the chapter needs consent from all parties, "consent shall be considered obtained whenever one party has announced to all other parties engaged in the communication or conversation, in any reasonably effective manner, that such communication or conversation is about to be recorded or transmitted: PROVIDED, That if the conversation is to be recorded that said announcement shall also be recorded."

Two clauses carry the weight. The first treats consent as obtained once somebody announces the recording "in any reasonably effective manner," which is a softer bar than pulling an explicit yes out of every caller. Then the proviso attaches a condition, and the condition is about your audio rather than your script.

Our first read of that proviso was that it describes what already happens, since an announcement spoken on a recorded call lands in the recording by default. That holds until you look at how calls get stitched together on a real floor. A notice played in the queue, before the call is bridged and the recorder armed, leaves a stored file whose first second is the operator's greeting. Your caller was told, and the method the statute spells out runs on a recording with nothing in it.

No script appears in the section, and "reasonably effective manner" is left undefined. Whether your line clears that bar is a question for a Washington lawyer, in writing, before it goes on forty accounts.

What the chapter reaches

Paragraph 1(a) makes it unlawful for "any individual, partnership, corporation, association, or the state of Washington" and its subdivisions to intercept or record a "private communication transmitted by telephone, telegraph, radio, or other device between two or more individuals between points within or without the state," absent "the consent of all the participants in the communication." Paragraph 1(b) does the same for a private conversation in a room, under a chapter titled Privacy, violating right of.

Private is the word doing the work here, and the section never defines it. That answer lives in Washington case law, which belongs to counsel rather than to a page like this one.

Send the same lawyer the phrase about points inside or outside the state, since the text says nothing about what it does to a call answered in Boise for a caller in Spokane.

Exceptions a working floor actually meets

Subsection 2 drops four categories to one party consent. Communications "of an emergency nature, such as the reporting of a fire, medical emergency, crime, or disaster" qualify. So do ones that "convey threats of extortion, blackmail, bodily harm, or other unlawful requests or demands," ones "which occur anonymously or repeatedly or at an extremely inconvenient hour," and hostage or barricaded person situations under RCW 70.85.100.

That third category is the one an answering service board runs into. A caller who hits the after hours line nine times before the on call schedule rolls over fits the words on the page fairly comfortably.

Sorting a call into an exception happens afterward and is a legal judgment rather than a QA criterion, and an exception covering one recording does nothing for the other eleven hundred on the account.

Below those sit two narrower carve outs, one for news gathering employees where the recording device is "readily apparent or obvious to the speakers" and one for custodial interrogations under RCW 10.122.040.

What a violation costs

Criminal exposure comes first and it is short. Under RCW 9.73.080, "any person who violates RCW 9.73.030 is guilty of a gross misdemeanor."

RCW 9.73.060 carries the civil action, and it reaches a violation committed "directly or by means of a detective agency or any other agent." Anyone claiming the violation "has injured his or her business, his or her person, or his or her reputation" can sue for actual damages including mental pain and suffering, or for liquidated damages "computed at the rate of one hundred dollars a day for each day of violation, not to exceed one thousand dollars, and a reasonable attorney's fee and other costs of litigation."

A thousand dollar ceiling reads cheap next to what other all party states put on the same conduct, and it is the least interesting number in the section. The statute writes that ceiling against a person so injured, while the fee award carries none at all, and how those scale across many callers goes to counsel.

Then the evidence problem. RCW 9.73.050 makes information obtained in violation of 9.73.030 "inadmissible in any civil or criminal case in all courts of general or limited jurisdiction in this state," with narrow exceptions. Audio kept for a billing dispute that no court will hear is a storage line item with nothing attached.

For the other states your accounts dial into, the state by state table carries the standard and the citation for each one.

Frequently asked questions

Paragraph 1(a) of RCW 9.73.030 asks for the consent of all the participants, which describes it better than two party once a call has three people on it.

Do you have to announce that a call is being recorded in Washington?

Subsection 3 treats consent as obtained when one party announces the recording in any reasonably effective manner. No wording appears in the statute, so what your operators actually say is a question for your lawyer.

Does the announcement itself have to be recorded?

Yes, when the conversation is being recorded. The proviso in subsection 3 attaches that condition directly, so a notice played before your recorder starts leaves the file with no evidence the announcement happened.

A violation of 9.73.030 is a gross misdemeanor under RCW 9.73.080. On the civil side, 9.73.060 allows actual damages or liquidated damages capped at one thousand dollars, plus attorney fees and costs.

Building the announcement so it survives the file

Two decisions turn the statute into something an operator can execute. Wording is the first and a lawyer's call, though the disclosure scripts hold five versions with placement rules attached. Washington adds the second, which nobody writes into a script because it lives in your telephony.

The announcement has to be inside the recorded audio, which means the recorder arms at answer, ahead of the greeting, so the file opens with the company name, then the notice, then the caller's first sentence. A notice playing only in the IVR while the caller waits in queue sits outside the file, and so does a greeting an operator improvises because the account script scrolled off the screen.

Once the line is in the script, the question turns into whether it got read. Say a board takes 1,800 Washington calls a month and three percent open with something the operator made up. That is 54 files where your policy and your stored audio disagree, and a sample of two calls per operator per week never lands on them. Make the announcement a critical fail on those accounts rather than a five point deduction, the way you already treat a callback number that never got read back digit by digit.

A required phrase is the kind of criterion software checks reliably against a transcript, with a timestamp on the second it was read. Whether a rushed announcement counts as reasonably effective is a judgment no scoring engine should be making, and none of them has an opinion on whether your wording satisfies 9.73.030 anyway.

If you want the presence check run against audio you already have, a call review takes six months of your Washington calls and returns every file where the announcement is missing or lands after the first exchange, at a fixed pilot price.

Sources

Four sections of the Revised Code of Washington, read on app.leg.wa.gov on 2026-09-12 and verified from primary text.

RCW 9.73.030, subsections 1 through 5: all participant consent, the recorded announcement method, the one party exceptions, news gathering, and custodial interrogations. Amended by 2021 c 329 s 21.
Inadmissibility at RCW 9.73.050, covering information obtained in violation of 9.73.030.
The civil action at RCW 9.73.060, actual or liquidated damages plus attorney fees and costs. Amended by 2011 c 336 s 324.
Penalties at RCW 9.73.080, a gross misdemeanor for violating 9.73.030.
Chapter 9.73 RCW, titled Privacy, violating right of.

Carried without primary verification:

Whether a given business call is a private communication under Washington case law, and how the damages ceiling and the fee award scale across many callers. Both routed to counsel.
What "between points within or without the state" does to a call with one end outside Washington. Unsettled, routed to counsel.
Consent standards for the other states. Held on the state law page.
Rule based criteria scoring more reliably than tone. Third party, unverified.