Is It Legal to Record a Conversation in Arizona?

Statute · Penalty: felony

Arizona Revised Statutes § 13-3005 (Interception of wire, electronic and oral communications; installation of pen register or trap and trace device; classification; exceptions)

In-person vs. phone & video calls

A.R.S. § 13-3005 does not distinguish between in-person and phone/electronic communications for consent purposes — both "wire/electronic communications" and in-person "conversations or discussions" are covered by the same one-party consent rule via the § 13-3012(9) exemption (consent of "a party to the communication or a person who is present during the communication"). No stricter rule applies to phone calls vs. in-person conversations.

Recording in public

A.R.S. § 13-3001(8) defines "oral communication" (the category covering in-person conversations) as speech "uttered by a person who exhibits an expectation that the communication is not subject to interception under circumstances justifying the expectation" — i.e., the statute itself only protects conversations where the speaker has a reasonable expectation of privacy. Arizona courts (e.g., a 1984 Court of Appeals decision addressing a police interrogation-room recording) have held there is no violation where no reasonable expectation of privacy exists in the circumstances. Consequently, loud public disputes, arguments, or interactions with police occurring in open public view generally fall outside statutory protection because participants typically lack a reasonable expectation that the exchange is private — though this is a fact-specific inquiry, not a bright-line "public place" exemption written into the statute text itself.

Recording at home

No special stricter (or more lenient) rule exists under A.R.S. § 13-3005 for recording inside one's own home versus elsewhere — the one-party consent standard for "conversations or discussions" applies regardless of location. The only Arizona statute with a location-based privacy carve-out is A.R.S. § 13-3019, which criminalizes surreptitious/hidden photographing or videotaping of a person in a restroom, bathroom, locker room, bedroom, or other place where they have a reasonable expectation of privacy while nude, dressing/undressing, or engaged in sexual activity, or footage that captures genitalia/buttocks/female breast not otherwise visible to the public. This voyeurism statute is aimed at hidden/secret recording of private bodily exposure, not at open wearable-device recording of disputes or interactions with others (including police) in a person's own home; it would not typically apply to the stated use case (openly capturing disputes/interactions) but could be implicated if the wearable inadvertently captured someone nude/undressing in a private area of a home without consent.

Recording the police

No statutory law-enforcement carve-out exists specifically permitting or restricting citizens recording on-duty police under §13-3005/§13-3012 beyond the general one-party consent rule — since the recording person is "present" during the interaction, their own presence satisfies the one-party consent exemption for audio, and video-only recording isn't covered by the wiretap statute at all (see below). Arizona did enact a specific police-recording restriction, HB2319 (2022), which made it a Class 3 misdemeanor to knowingly video record law enforcement activity within 8 feet after a warning to stop; this law was preliminarily enjoined as facially unconstitutional by a federal district court in September 2022 (D. Ariz., Judge John Tuchi), and the Arizona Attorney General agreed in July 2023 to a permanent injunction/settlement in Arizona Broadcasters Ass'n v. Brnovich (D. Ariz., permanent injunction entered July 21, 2023), so it is currently unenforceable. (Note: some post-2023 sources may cite this as "...v. Mayes" since Kris Mayes succeeded Mark Brnovich as Attorney General in January 2023, but the case is consistently identified as "v. Brnovich" by the ACLU, which litigated it.) Arizona sits in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which has recognized a First Amendment right to record police performing official duties in public: Fordyce v. City of Seattle, 55 F.3d 436 (9th Cir. 1995), and Askins v. U.S. Dep't of Homeland Security, 899 F.3d 1035, 1044 (9th Cir. 2018) (right to record extends to law enforcement officers in public places, subject to reasonable time/place/manner restrictions).

Video-only capture (no audio)

Silent video-only recording (no audio) is NOT restricted by A.R.S. § 13-3005, because that statute's "intercept" definition (A.R.S. §13-3001(7)) is tied to "aural or other acquisition of the contents of any wire, electronic or oral communication" — the operative offenses concern communications (wire/electronic/oral), not simply capturing images. Video without audio capture of public disputes/interactions is not treated as an "interception" under the wiretap chapter. Video recording is instead separately governed by A.R.S. § 13-3019, a distinct voyeurism-style statute triggered only by surreptitious/hidden recording of a person's nudity, undressing, sexual activity, or genitalia/buttocks/breast in a place carrying a reasonable expectation of privacy (e.g., restroom, bedroom) — it does not restrict open recording of public disputes or police interactions.

What counts as a “private” conversation →

Arizona's gate is a reasonable-expectation-of-privacy test written directly into the statutory definition of "oral communication" at A.R.S. § 13-3001(8): "a spoken communication that is uttered by a person who exhibits an expectation that the communication is not subject to interception under circumstances justifying the expectation but does not include any electronic communication." (Independently fetched and quote-verified verbatim against the official azleg.gov text — full clause, not truncated.) This is a two-part test — (1) the speaker must subjectively exhibit an expectation of privacy, and (2) that expectation must be objectively "justif[ied]" by the surrounding circumstances — functionally a Katz-style reasonable-expectation-of-privacy test, but codified by the legislature rather than announced purely by case law. Arizona case law applies this test to find no violation where no reasonable expectation of privacy exists: State v. Hauss (also cited as Arizona v. Hauss), 142 Ariz. 159, parallel citation 688 P.2d 1051 (Ariz. Ct. App. 1984) — held that recording a defendant's conversation with his girlfriend in a police interrogation room did not violate the eavesdropping statute because the pair had no reasonable expectation of privacy there. I independently confirmed this case's existence, citation, and holding via the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press's official Arizona recording-law guide (rcfp.org) after direct-opinion sources (CourtListener, Justia, Leagle, Casetext, Google Scholar, case.law, FindLaw, Casemine, Anylaw) were all blocked (403/404/CAPTCHA/JS-rendering) or rate-limited (429) for me as well — the same wall the original researcher hit, but I found a working alternate path they had not tried. Critically, this expectation-of-privacy gate is textually limited to the "oral communication" category (in-person speech) — it does NOT apply to "wire communication" (§13-3001(14), independently confirmed: "any aural transfer that is made in whole or in part through the use of facilities for the transmission of communications by the aid of any wire, cable or other like connection") or "electronic communication" (§13-3001(4), independently confirmed: "any transfer of signs, signals, writing, images, sounds, data or intelligence of any nature that is transmitted in whole or in part by a wire, radio, electromagnetic, photoelectronic or photooptical system"), both of which are defined purely by transmission medium with no expectation-based qualifier at all. So phone calls and electronic communications are protected by the wiretap statute regardless of any reasonable-expectation-of-privacy inquiry, while only in-person conversations must first clear the privacy-expectation gate. An in-person exchange must first qualify as an "oral communication" under A.R.S. §13-3001(8)'s reasonable-expectation-of-privacy test (the speaker exhibited an expectation of privacy that is objectively justified by the circumstances); if it clears that threshold, only one participating party's consent is required to record it (Arizona is a one-party state via the §13-3012(9) consent exemption, independently confirmed verbatim: consent of "a party to the communication or a person who is present during the communication"); if it does not clear that threshold — e.g., a loud public dispute or an exchange occurring in circumstances where no reasonable expectation of privacy exists (as in State v. Hauss, 142 Ariz. 159 / 688 P.2d 1051 (Ariz. Ct. App. 1984), a police-interrogation-room recording) — the exchange is not a protected "oral communication" at all and no one's consent is required, while phone calls and other "wire"/"electronic communications" skip this gate entirely and are one-party-consent-protected regardless of any privacy expectation, because those two definitions (§13-3001(14) and (4)) are keyed solely to transmission medium, not to any expectation-of-privacy showing. This logic is internally consistent with the existing row's consent_type ("one_party") and does not alter the applicable consent rule — it only clarifies which category a given exchange must fall into before that consent rule is even triggered.

Biometric / voiceprint law →

None currently in effect. Arizona has (a) no BIPA/CUBI-style dedicated biometric privacy statute, and (b) no comprehensive consumer privacy law (no CCPA/VCDPA/CPA/CTDPA/UCPA analog) that would sweep in biometric data as "sensitive data." The only enacted Arizona statute using the term "biometric information" is A.R.S. § 15-109, a narrow K-12 school-district statute requiring parental written consent before a school collects a pupil's biometric information — verified against the primary statutory text; it has no application to a private company's adult consumer product. A dedicated commercial biometric-identifier bill, SB 1717 ("biometric identifiers; commercial use; prohibitions"), was introduced Feb. 5, 2026, and — per the bill's own text (verified directly from the azleg.gov PDF) — would have required notice-and-consent before commercial capture of a "biometric identifier" (expressly defined to include "voiceprint"), with Attorney General-only civil-penalty enforcement (up to $25,000/violation) and no private right of action. It did not pass before the Legislature adjourned sine die on June 13, 2026 (confirmed directly on azleg.gov's homepage), and billtrack50 lists it as "Dead" as of June 14, 2026. It is not law. — None as a matter of enacted Arizona statutory law. No pre-collection consent, notice, or retention/destruction-policy requirement currently applies in Arizona specifically to capturing a voiceprint for a commercial product like live.law's voice-enrollment feature. (For context only, not currently binding: SB 1717 as introduced defined "biometric identifier" to expressly include "voiceprint record" (§44-1383(2)) and would have required informing the individual and obtaining consent before commercial capture (§44-1383.01(A)), restricted sale/disclosure (§44-1383.01(C)(1)), and required destruction "not later than the first anniversary of the date the purpose for collecting the biometric identifier expires" (§44-1383.01(C)(3)) — but this never became law.)

Attorney ethics (ABA Formal Op. 01-422) →

CORRECTED FINDING: The researcher's four cited opinions (95-03, 90-02, 75-13, 00-04) and their content are accurate and independently corroborated, but the researcher's claim that Arizona's successor ethics body "has not addressed recording/taping in any opinion in its published list; none found" is FALSE and must be corrected — the successor Attorney Ethics Advisory Committee (AEAC) DID squarely address it in 2020-21, and the outcome makes Arizona's current position more firmly established (not less) than the original write-up assumed. 1) The underlying 1975-2000 opinions, as characterized by the researcher, check out. I independently confirmed their content — not from azbar.org's own JS-rendered opinion-search widget (which I could not scrape directly; the widget returns no static text to a fetcher), but from a highly credible independent primary-adjacent source: the Arizona Supreme Court's own Attorney Ethics Advisory Committee, in a 13-page opinion (EO-20-0002) that quotes and analyzes each of these opinions verbatim. That document confirms, verbatim: Op. 90-02 permits "the recording of witness conversations by criminal defense attorneys or their agents, with the consent of only one party to the conversation, ... for the purpose of protecting against perjury or for the purpose of obtaining impeachment material should the testimony of the witness be different at trial" (Ariz. Ethics Op. 90-02, at 6) — an exact match to the researcher's quote. It confirms Op. 75-13's four exceptions (crime-utterance, perjury-shield, informant self-protection, court-authorized) essentially verbatim as the researcher summarized. It confirms Op. 95-03 (1995) held recording opposing counsel "inherently deceptive" under the misconduct rule (EO-20-0002 also flags, exactly as the researcher's notes did, that 95-03 miscites the rule as "ER 8.4(d)" when it should be "ER 8.4(c)" — calling it "a typo"). And it confirms Op. 00-04 (2000) held a lawyer may advise a client to record without disclosure so long as the lawyer determines the client's recording is legal. 2) THE CRITICAL CORRECTION: In 2020, the AEAC (the very "successor body" the researcher says never addressed this) drafted Ethics Opinion File No. EO-20-0002, which states on its face: "Undisclosed recording of a telephone or other conversation by a lawyer, or a person acting at the lawyer's direction, is not a per se violation of the Rules of Professional Conduct, provided that the recording does not violate applicable laws. This Opinion revisits prior Arizona Ethics Opinions, including Arizona Ethics Opinions 75-13, 90-02, 95-03, and 00-04 ... To the extent those opinions ... created a rule that an attorney who records another individual without disclosing the recording is acting per se unethically or with some form of 'inherent deception,' ... those opinions are superseded." It goes on: "We therefore overrule our prior Opinion 95-03, and find that Rule 8.4(c) does not support a per se prohibition on undisclosed recordings by, or at the direction of, lawyers, provided that the recording otherwise complies with applicable laws." The opinion repeatedly and approvingly cites ABA Standing Comm. on Ethics & Prof'l Responsibility, Formal Op. 01-422 (2001) as persuasive authority for exactly this move, alongside similar opinions from Alaska, Ohio, Utah, Texas, and others. The AEAC voted 12-0-4 in January 2021 to submit EO-20-0002 to the Arizona Supreme Court for the sign-off Rule 42.1 requires before an AEAC opinion becomes final/binding. But the Arizona Supreme Court REJECTED it on April 13, 2021, and directed that it not be posted or distributed — which is exactly why it does not appear on the Committee's public list of issued opinions (the researcher's search of that list was performed correctly; it's just that the list's silence reflects suppression of a REJECTED proposal, not a topic nobody had gotten to). Legal-ethics commentary (Ethics at Law blog; a Vermont bar counsel's ethics blog citing law professor Prof. Bernabe's contemporaneous reporting) independently corroborates this rejection and its date, describing it as "the first time" since 2019 the Court declined to approve an AEAC opinion, and stating the Court's action left intact Arizona's "decades-long position that surreptitious recording by lawyers is per se unethical even though it may be legal" (at least as to opposing counsel, per 95-03). NET EFFECT ON THE ANSWER: The bottom-line classification of "middle_ground" is still the best fit — Arizona's operative rule genuinely varies by who is being recorded (unethical for opposing counsel per 95-03; permitted for witnesses/adverse parties in a criminal-defense investigative context per 90-02/75-13; permitted to advise a client to record per 00-04) — but the confidence basis is now meaningfully different and, if anything, stronger than the original write-up suggested: this is not simply "stale, unrevisited pre-2001 guidance." Arizona's Supreme Court has affirmatively considered, and within the last five years expressly declined, an opportunity to adopt ABA 01-422's more permissive not-per-se-unethical rule. That rejection is not itself a published, binding judicial opinion with reasoning (it's a one-line administrative denial, known only through leaked/circulated drafts and secondary reporting rather than an official public order), so it doesn't convert 95-03/90-02/75-13/00-04 into anything more than the advisory-only ethics opinions they've always been — but it does confirm, more recently and more authoritatively than the researcher realized, that Arizona has not moved off that framework and that its highest court was squarely asked to and refused. Minor citation notes: the AEAC's own opinion cites the one-party-consent authorization simply as "A.R.S. §§ 13-3005; 13-3012(9)" and the federal parallel as "18 U.S.C. § 2511(2)(d)" — I could not independently confirm the researcher's more specific pinpoint "A.R.S. § 13-3005(A)(2)," though the base statute number is correct.

Can you personally sue over a violation?

Yes — this state gives a private right of action, not just criminal/regulatory enforcement.

Can I record as a guest in someone else's home?

Arizona doesn't lean hard on where you're standing — recording as a guest in someone else's home is treated much like recording anywhere else in the state.

What if I'm on a call with someone in another state?

Which state's rule actually governs an interstate call touching Arizona isn't clearly settled. The safest approach is still to follow whichever state — yours or theirs — requires more from you.

This is a newer, less-settled corner of the law — our own research is still being refined here, so treat this as a starting point, not a final answer.

If it's legal to record, can it still be used against me later?

Usually, yes. Being legal to record and being protected from a future court case are two different questions — a legal recording can generally still be obtained by the other side later. A third person being briefly or incidentally present doesn't automatically wreck that protection here, but it's still not something to count on. Recording your own conversation with your own attorney is a separate, more protected situation, but almost everything else — a landlord, a police officer, a family member — isn't automatically off-limits to opposing counsel just because it was legal to capture.

This is a newer, less-settled corner of the law — our own research is still being refined here, so treat this as a starting point, not a final answer.