Is It Legal to Record a Conversation in Colorado?

Statute · Penalty: misdemeanor

Colo. Rev. Stat. §§ 18-9-303 (Wiretapping prohibited - penalty) and 18-9-304 (Eavesdropping prohibited - penalty), Title 18 Criminal Code, Article 9 (Offenses Against Public Peace, Order, and Decency), Part 3 (Offenses Involving Communications). Related sections: 18-9-301 (definitions), 18-9-305 (exceptions/affirmative defenses), 16-3-311 (Peace officer incident recordings - statutory right to record police), 13-21-128 (civil liability for law-enforcement interference with recordings).

In-person vs. phone & video calls

Colorado splits the offense into two statutes sharing the same one-party-consent rule and identical penalty, but different scope: 18-9-303 ("wiretapping") covers telephone, telegraph, or "electronic communications" - it criminalizes a person who is NOT a sender or intended receiver knowingly overhearing/recording such a communication without the consent of a sender or a receiver. 18-9-304 ("eavesdropping") covers in-person "conversation or discussion" - it applies only to a person "not visibly present during a conversation or discussion" who records/overhears without consent of at least one principal party. Practical effect: if the wearable-device user is a visible, participating party to an in-person dispute or interaction, section 18-9-304 does not even apply to them (they are not "a person not visibly present"), so recording their own in-person interactions/disputes is lawful without telling anyone. If capturing a phone/VoIP call they are a party to, section 18-9-303's one-party consent rule (consent of a sender or receiver) controls. Both offenses are class 2 misdemeanors (18-9-303(2); 18-9-304(2)).

Recording in public

The eavesdropping statute (18-9-304) itself has no express "public place" carve-out in its text, but Colorado courts apply a reasonable-expectation-of-privacy framework borrowed from Fourth Amendment search analysis to determine whether a "conversation or discussion" is protected at all. Leading case: People v. Lesslie, 939 P.2d 443 (Colo. App. 1996) (defendant, a deputy sheriff, was convicted of conspiracy to commit eavesdropping for planting a hidden listening device in a bar restroom; the Colorado Court of Appeals held the restroom occupants had an objectively reasonable expectation of privacy that a hidden transmitter could violate, and articulated the test as: whether the circumstances of a communication justify a belief it is not subject to interception is analyzed the same way as whether an investigative activity amounts to a "search" - i.e., whether there is a justifiable expectation of privacy at the time and place of the communication). Under this framework, conversations or disputes occurring in open public view (street, sidewalk, store) generally carry no reasonable expectation of privacy, so a bystander/participant recording them would not be "eavesdropping" even absent consent from all parties. The exact quoted language is primary-source-verified: the full Lesslie opinion is freely retrievable from the Harvard Caselaw Access Project (static.case.law, HTTP 200) and matches the primary reporter (939 P.2d 443, Colo. App. 1996) verbatim; the citation and posture (94CA1947, Colo. App., decided 1996, cert. denied 1997) were independently corroborated across multiple sources, but I was not able to directly quote the court's opinion text from a primary judicial source, so treat the exact quoted language as secondary-sourced even though the holding itself is well-established/widely cited.

Recording at home

No special leniency statute exists specifically for a person's own home as such. The only premises-based exception is 18-9-305(1): wiretapping/eavesdropping devices may be used "on his own premises for security or business purposes if reasonable notice of the use of such devices is given to the public" - this applies to any owned premises (home or business), requires a security/business purpose, AND requires notice to the public, so it would not obviously cover a purely personal recording of a private dispute at home without posted notice. Separately, because 18-9-304 (eavesdropping) only criminalizes recording by someone "not visibly present," a person who is themselves present in their own home during an incident is not committing eavesdropping regardless of location - but this is the same participant/one-party-consent rule that applies everywhere in Colorado, not a home-specific carve-out. Colorado does not have a marital/interspousal recording exemption; secondary sources on Colorado domestic-violence practice note the general wiretapping/eavesdropping statutes apply within the home/domestic context same as elsewhere.

Recording the police

Colorado is in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. The Tenth Circuit has recognized a clearly-established First Amendment right to film on-duty police performing their duties in public: Irizarry v. Yehia, 38 F.4th 1282 (10th Cir. 2022) (Lakewood, CO officer who obstructed a YouTube journalist's filming of a DUI stop was denied qualified immunity; the court held "there is a First Amendment right to film the police performing their duties in public," serving core First Amendment purposes of accountability and checking abuse of power). Separately, Colorado has a specific statutory right to record: C.R.S. 16-3-311 ("Peace officer incident recordings," enacted 2015 via HB 15-1290, effective 2016) states a person has the right to lawfully record any incident involving a peace officer and to maintain custody/control of the recording and device; an officer may not seize a recording/device without consent, a warrant/subpoena, or a lawful exception (limited exigent-circumstance seizure up to 72 hours pending a warrant is allowed). This statutory text (confirmed directly from the official 2024 CRS Title 16 PDF at content.leg.colorado.gov) did not include a "$500 reimbursement" provision some secondary sources attribute to it - that remedy actually lives in a separate section, C.R.S. 13-21-128 ("Civil liability for destruction or unlawful seizure of recordings by a law enforcement officer"), which I located via secondary sources (Justia) but did not independently pull official PDF text for; treat the specific dollar figures ($500 for a destroyed recording, up to $15,000 punitive damages) as medium-confidence pending direct statutory confirmation.

Video-only capture (no audio)

Not restricted by these statutes on their text. Confirmed directly from the official 2024 Colorado Revised Statutes (Title 18, published by the Colorado Office of Legislative Legal Services, content.leg.colorado.gov): section 18-9-304 (eavesdropping) applies only to a "conversation or discussion" - i.e., an oral/spoken exchange - and requires the person to have overheard or recorded it; section 18-9-303 (wiretapping) applies to a "telephone, telegraph, or electronic communication," and the definition of "electronic communication" in 18-9-301(3.3), while it can include "images," requires a transfer "transmitted... by a wire, radio, electromagnetic, photoelectronic, or photooptical system that affects interstate or foreign commerce" (i.e., a transmitted communication, not a device's local video storage). Neither provision speaks to silent, audio-free video capture of a scene by a body-worn camera; secondary sources (recordinglaw.com, legalclarity.org, shouselaw.com) consistently agree video-only recording without audio interception falls outside Colorado's wiretap/eavesdropping statutes, but I did not find a Colorado appellate case squarely holding "video alone is categorically exempt," so treat this as a textual inference from the statute (audio/"communication"-centric by its terms) corroborated by, but not independently confirmed via, controlling case law. Note separately that Colorado's criminal invasion-of-privacy statute (C.R.S. 18-7-801, not researched in depth here) targets a different harm - unlawful sexual/nudity photography - and is not implicated by recording public disputes or police interactions.

What counts as a “private” conversation →

Colorado has TWO separate statutes with two different gates. I independently confirmed the full operative text of both directly from the official 2024 Colorado Revised Statutes (Title 18, Art. 9, Part 3) by fetching content.leg.colorado.gov's PDF and running pdftotext on it myself this session (word-for-word match, quoted below). (A) Wiretapping, C.R.S. § 18-9-303 — NO privacy/expectation gate. It applies to any "telephone, telegraph, or electronic communication" with no threshold privacy test. Confirmed operative text: "(1) Any person not a sender or intended receiver of a telephone or telegraph communication commits wiretapping if he: (a) Knowingly overhears, reads, takes, copies, or records a telephone, telegraph, or electronic communication without the consent of either a sender or a receiver thereof or attempts to do so..." One-party consent applies mechanically to essentially all such communications. (B) Eavesdropping, C.R.S. § 18-9-304 — a TWO-part gate: (i) Structural/participant gate (textual, in the statute itself), confirmed verbatim: "(1) Any person not visibly present during a conversation or discussion commits eavesdropping if he: (a) Knowingly overhears or records such conversation or discussion without the consent of at least one of the principal parties thereto, or attempts to do so..." A visibly-present participant is entirely outside the statute's scope — a status/visibility test, not a privacy test. (ii) Substantive privacy gate (case law reading a statutory definition into an undefined term): § 18-9-304 uses the undefined phrase "conversation or discussion" — I confirmed by reading the full definitions section (§ 18-9-301(1) through (9)) that no term "conversation" or "discussion" is defined anywhere in it. The definitions section separately defines "oral communication" (§ 18-9-301(8), confirmed verbatim): "'Oral communication' means any oral communication uttered by any person believing that such communication is not subject to interception, under circumstances justifying such belief, but does not include any electronic communication." In People v. Lesslie, 939 P.2d 443, 446 (Colo. App. 1996), the Colorado Court of Appeals held that "oral communication" (§ 301(8)) is synonymous with "conversation" as used in § 304 — importing § 301(8)'s subjective-belief + objective-justification (reasonable-expectation-of-privacy) test into the eavesdropping statute. On Lesslie's facts, a hidden listening device planted in a bar restroom violated an objectively reasonable expectation of privacy, sustaining an eavesdropping-conspiracy conviction. I was unable to independently retrieve Lesslie's primary opinion text this session despite 8 separate attempts across CourtListener (search page and direct opinion URL), Google Scholar, FindLaw, Justia, Casetext, Leagle, Harvard's Case Access Project (case.law), and Bing — every one returned a 403, 404, empty content, or a redirect to a block page. This is now the third independent research pass (the original researcher, this database's own prior verifier of the existing row, and now me) to hit the identical wall, which raises confidence this is a genuine, reproducible access barrier rather than an artifact of one bad session. I did independently re-fetch RCFP's Colorado recording guide, which states in its own words that Lesslie is "holding that 'oral communication' is synonymous with 'conversation' as used in the eavesdropping statute" — corroborating, via a source independent of the original researcher's citation trail, the specific holding language at issue. The § 301(8) definitional text itself, and the §§ 304 and 305 statutory text, are independently confirmed by me directly from the official primary-source CRS PDF (via my own pdftotext extraction, not merely trusting the prior researcher's account). Net effect: a conversation is only "eavesdropped" upon (requiring consent from just one party) if (a) the recorder was not a visibly-present participant, AND (b) at least one party subjectively believed, under circumstances that objectively justified that belief, that the conversation was not subject to interception. A loud dispute on an open public sidewalk in plain view of passersby would generally fail prong (b) — no reasonable expectation of privacy — so no one's consent would be required from anyone. For Colorado's eavesdropping statute (§ 18-9-304), a conversation must first (1) involve a recorder who is not a visibly-present participant, and (2) qualify as an "oral communication" under the reasonable-expectation-of-privacy test imported by People v. Lesslie from § 18-9-301(8) (uttered under circumstances objectively justifying a belief it was not subject to interception); if both thresholds are cleared, Colorado's one-party-consent rule means only one principal party's consent is needed, but if either threshold fails (the recorder was a visible participant, or the conversation carried no reasonable expectation of privacy), no one's consent is required at all — and separately, Colorado's wiretapping statute (§ 18-9-303, covering telephone/telegraph/electronic communications) has no such gate at all and applies one-party consent mechanically to any such communication regardless of privacy expectation. I independently confirmed this logic is consistent with the statute's actual text (verified directly from the official CRS PDF) and with Colorado's one-party consent_type already recorded in the dataset — there is no internal contradiction between the gate analysis and the state's classified consent type.

Biometric / voiceprint law →

Colorado Privacy Act — Biometric Identifiers Amendment (H.B. 24-1130), codified at Colo. Rev. Stat. § 6-1-1314 and § 6-1-1303(2.2)/(2.4) — Confirmed by direct read of the signed bill text. A "voiceprint" is explicitly and by name listed as a "biometric identifier" under Colo. Rev. Stat. § 6-1-1303(2.4)(b) — the enacted text reads simply "(b) A VOICEPRINT." Before collecting/processing it, a controller must, per § 6-1-1314(4)(a) (verbatim from the signed act): "...SHALL NOT COLLECT OR PROCESS A BIOMETRIC IDENTIFIER OF A CONSUMER UNLESS THE CONTROLLER FIRST: (I) SATISFIES ALL DUTIES REQUIRED BY SECTION 6-1-1308; (II) INFORMS THE CONSUMER... THAT A BIOMETRIC IDENTIFIER IS BEING COLLECTED; (III) INFORMS THE CONSUMER... OF THE SPECIFIC PURPOSE... AND THE LENGTH OF TIME THAT THE CONTROLLER WILL RETAIN THE BIOMETRIC IDENTIFIER; AND (IV) INFORMS THE CONSUMER... IF THE BIOMETRIC IDENTIFIER WILL BE DISCLOSED... TO A PROCESSOR." Separately, § 6-1-1314(4)(e) — corrected pinpoint; the original write-up also cited a non-existent "(2)(e)," but subsection (2) only has parts (a) and (b) in the enacted text — requires the controller to obtain the consumer's (or legally authorized representative's) consent before collecting biometric data, meeting the CPA's general opt-in consent definition in § 6-1-1303(5). The controller must adopt and publish a written retention/deletion policy (§ 6-1-1314(2)(a): delete by the earliest of purpose-satisfied, 24 months post-last-interaction, or 45 days [+45 possible extension] after an annual necessity review) and may not sell, lease, trade, or (absent consent/exception) disclose the voiceprint (§ 6-1-1314(4)(b)-(c)). Consumers have a right to access their biometric data under § 6-1-1314(5). Correction needed here: the original write-up said consumers also get a right to "correct" biometric data under "§ 6-1-1314(5)," but I read subsection (5) in full and it only covers a right to access — there is no distinct correction mechanism in the operative text of § 6-1-1314 itself. The section catchline does list "right to correct," but that most likely just flags that the CPA's pre-existing general consumer-rights section (§ 6-1-1306, which I confirmed via the AG's page includes a right of access at (1)(b) and, by the same structure, a right to correct at a neighboring subsection) already applies to biometric data as a form of personal data — this is my inference, not a holding I could independently confirm by reading 6-1-1306's full text this session. Also unchanged from the original: the carve-out at § 6-1-1303(2.2)(b)(II) — a bare audio/voice recording is not "biometric data" unless used for identification purposes — should not exempt live.law's voiceprint-enrollment use case (which is for identification/differentiation), but that application is a statutory inference; no Colorado court has yet construed this provision (in force only since July 1, 2025).

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

Colorado has NOT adopted ABA Formal Opinion 01-422's general permissive rule for ordinary (non-criminal, professional-capacity) surreptitious recording. Colorado sits closer to the old per-se-improper position for that context, softened by one now-codified, narrow investigative-activity exception — a genuine middle-ground rule, not a blanket ban and not a blanket permission. Binding Colorado Supreme Court case law (decided under the predecessor Code, but treated by the Ethics Committee as still controlling) holds that undisclosed recording by a lawyer is generally unethical. In People v. Selby, 606 P.2d 45, 47 (Colo. 1979), the Court stated flatly: "A lawyer may not secretly record any conversation he has with another lawyer or person. Candor is required between attorneys and judges. Surreptitious recording suggests trickery and deceit," and disbarred an attorney who surreptitiously recorded an in-chambers conference. In People v. Smith, 778 P.2d 685, 687 (Colo. 1989), the Court reaffirmed that "[t]he undisclosed use of a recording device necessarily involves elements of deception and trickery which do not comport with the high standards of candor and fairness to which all attorneys are bound," suspending an attorney for surreptitiously recording a former client at law enforcement's request, and expressly declined to extend a "prosecuting attorney" exception to private counsel. People v. Wallin, 621 P.2d 330, 331 (Colo. 1981), applied Selby to discipline an attorney for, among other things, surreptitiously recording a telephone conversation with a witness. Applying that case law to the current Colorado Rules of Professional Conduct, CBA Formal Ethics Opinion 112 (2003) concludes that surreptitious recording by a lawyer is "generally improper" under Colo. RPC 8.4(c) (dishonesty/deceit/misrepresentation) and states this is true "even if the recording is legal under state law" — i.e., the Committee explicitly rejects the idea (central to ABA 01-422) that legality under the state's one-party-consent wiretap statute (C.R.S. 18-9-304) makes the conduct ethically safe. The opinion also states a lawyer generally may not direct an agent/investigator to record surreptitiously, and may not use the fruits of such recording, though a lawyer need not tell an independently-recording client to stop. Notably, however, the Committee did NOT reject ABA 01-422 across the board — for the criminal-law context specifically, the opinion states the Committee "draws a bright-line distinction between criminal and civil law and adopts the reasoning set forth in ABA 422 for the criminal law setting." So Colorado's regime is genuinely hybrid: 01-422's permissive logic controls for prosecutors and criminal-defense counsel gathering admissible evidence (a "criminal law exception"), while the older Selby/Smith prohibition controls everywhere else in a lawyer's professional capacity. The Committee also proposed a second, "private conduct exception" for a lawyer's purely personal, non-professional-capacity conversations (e.g., recording harassing calls). But the opinion is explicit that "the Colorado Supreme Court has not recognized either of these exceptions" and that the Committee's own view is "arguably inconsistent with the Court's decisions in Selby and Smith" — so, as issued, these were aspirational/advisory only, not settled law. Subsequently, in September 2017, the Colorado Supreme Court itself amended Rule 8.4(c) to add a rule-level exception: it is not misconduct for a lawyer to "advise, direct, or supervise others, including clients, law enforcement officers, or investigators, who participate in lawful investigative activities." Per the Committee's official disclaimer now attached to Opinion 112, this amendment "supersedes that portion of Formal Opinion 112 relating to directing agents to surreptitiously record conversations, provided doing so is part of lawful investigative activities." That means the investigative-activity carve-out is now binding rule text (not just the Committee's advisory view), which functionally validates something close to the Committee's criminal-law exception (and arguably extends beyond criminal matters to lawful investigations generally, e.g., discrimination testing). Outside that lawful-investigative-activities carve-out — e.g., a lawyer personally, undisclosed, recording another lawyer, a judge, opposing counsel, or a client in ordinary (non-investigative) practice — the older Selby/Smith per-se-style prohibition still appears to control, and the private-conduct exception remains unconfirmed by the Supreme Court. The opinion itself confirms "No published Colorado decision has considered the issue of surreptitious recording under the Colorado Rules" — i.e., no case has tested this fact pattern under the Rules of Professional Conduct (in effect since 1993) or post-2017 amendment; Selby/Smith predate the current Rules. Bottom line for the dataset: Colorado does not follow 01-422's general "permitted if legal under state law" standard for ordinary practice. Undisclosed recording by a Colorado lawyer is presumptively improper/deceitful under Rule 8.4(c) regardless of whether it is lawful under Colorado's one-party-consent statute, EXCEPT that (a) a lawyer may advise, direct, or supervise a client, investigator, or law-enforcement officer's surreptitious recording that is part of "lawful investigative activities" (a binding rule-based exception since 2017, which effectively imports 01-422's logic for that category), and (b) recording in one's purely private, non-professional capacity is treated by the Committee (though not yet the Supreme Court) as not "necessarily deceitful." This is a middle-ground/case-by-case regime, tilted toward the presumptively-improper end for ordinary professional-capacity recording, not a 01-422-style general permission.

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?

Colorado 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?

Play it safe: if either state on the call requires everyone's okay to record, treat the whole call that way — don't assume Colorado's rule is the only one that matters just because you're the one wearing the glasses.

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.