Recording Law for Employers & Businesses in Arkansas

Arkansas law makes it illegal to record any conversation unless at least one person taking part in that conversation knows about and agrees to the recording. This rule applies to every kind of conversation—face-to-face chats, phone calls, video calls, and even loud arguments in public. The law itself says it is unlawful to "intercept a wire, landline, oral, telephonic communication, or wireless communication" unless the person recording is part of the conversation or one participant has given prior consent. Arkansas courts have applied this rule directly to recorded phone calls without adding any privacy-expectation test, so the law’s coverage starts with the conversation itself, not where it happens.

The rule is written in Arkansas Code Annotated § 5-60-120. The exact wording is: "It is unlawful for a person to intercept a wire, landline, oral, telephonic communication, or wireless communication, and to record or possess a recording of the communication unless the person is a party to the communication or one (1) of the parties to the communication has given prior consent to the interception and recording." In Lewis v. State, 336 Ark. 469 (1999), the Arkansas Supreme Court quoted the statute’s one-party-consent rule directly when upholding a probation revocation based on a secretly recorded call, confirming the statute’s application without additional requirements. The penalty for breaking this law is a Class A misdemeanor.

Arkansas’s one-party-consent statute contains no public-place carve-out, so a conversation between third parties does not automatically fall outside the rule simply because it occurs in a public setting. If an employee is not part of the conversation and no participant has agreed to being recorded, the employee must not capture that conversation, whether in a store, on a sidewalk, or in a parking lot. The law looks only at whether the recorder is part of the conversation or has one participant’s consent—it does not look at where the conversation happens or how loud it is. This is different from states like California or Washington, where courts consider whether speakers had a reasonable expectation of privacy.

Arkansas places no special restrictions on recording conversations inside someone’s home based on location alone; the one-party-consent rule applies the same way in a living room as it does on a street corner. The only Arkansas law that restricts video recording in private areas is a narrow video voyeurism statute, Ark. Code Ann. § 5-16-101, which targets covert filming of private body parts in places like bathrooms or bedrooms. That law is unlikely to affect ordinary workplace documentation or customer service recordings, unless the recording is deliberately secret and focused on someone’s private body parts.

Arkansas has a separate law that protects your right to record on-duty police officers in public places or on private property where you are lawfully present. Arkansas Code Annotated § 21-1-106 says a public officer cannot prohibit you from using a recording device in a public place or on private property you are legally allowed to be, subject to narrow exceptions like immediate safety risks or trespass. However, the Eighth Circuit has not recognized a clearly established First Amendment right to record on-duty police in its jurisdiction, creating a circuit split with several sister circuits that have recognized such a right. In practice, recording police is safer when you are clearly in a public place, not interfering with their work, and not in a restricted area.

Arkansas does not require businesses to get consent or give notice before capturing a voiceprint. Arkansas’s Personal Information Protection Act includes voiceprints as "biometric data" and as "personal information," but the law only imposes breach-notification duties after a breach occurs. It does not impose any pre-collection consent, retention, or policy-disclosure requirements. A 2025 bill that would have created broader biometric privacy rules failed in the legislature, so the current rule remains: no consent is needed before capturing a voiceprint, only proper handling if a breach later happens.

Imagine an employee wearing smart glasses is restocking shelves when two customers loudly argue near the entrance. The employee wants to record the argument to document what happened. Under Arkansas law, the employee can record only if the employee is part of the conversation or at least one of the customers has agreed to the recording. Because the wearer is not part of the conversation and no customer has consented, the employee must not record. If the employee secretly records anyway, the recording could violate § 5-60-120 and may be a Class A misdemeanor.

Even if a recording violates Arkansas’s one-party-consent statute, Arkansas courts have held that such a recording is still admissible in court when made by a private individual. In Elliott v. State, 335 Ark. 387 (1998), the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled that the exclusionary rule does not apply to private actors, so a secretly recorded call that incriminated the defendant was admitted as evidence despite violating § 5-60-120. This means the legality of the recording itself is separate from whether it can be used later in court.