Recording Law for Recording at Home in South Carolina

South Carolina’s wiretap law says you can record any conversation you take part in without telling the others. The rule is written in S.C. Code § 17-30-30(C): “It is lawful under this chapter for a person not acting under color of law to intercept a wire, oral, or electronic communication where the person is a party to the communication or where one of the parties to the communication has given prior consent to the interception.” That means if you’re in the room and talking, you can turn on your phone or recorder and capture what’s said. It doesn’t matter whether the talk happens in your living room, a friend’s apartment, or any other private home. The law treats all of those the same as long as you’re one of the speakers.

The statute only protects conversations that the speaker expects to stay private. S.C. Code § 17-30-15 defines “oral communication” as: “any oral communication uttered by a person exhibiting an expectation that the communication is not subject to interception under circumstances justifying the expectation and does not mean any public oral communication uttered at a public meeting or any electronic communication.” Loud arguments on a public sidewalk usually don’t meet that test, but quiet talks inside a house do. The law also carves out “any public oral communication uttered at a public meeting,” so speeches at city council hearings aren’t protected either. If the speaker is in a place where privacy is reasonable—like a private home—then the one-party rule applies.

If you’re not part of the conversation, South Carolina’s wiretap law doesn’t let you secretly record it. S.C. Code § 16-17-470 contains two separate offenses. Subsection (A), the base “eavesdropper/peeping tom” offense, criminalizes using video or audio equipment to spy on or invade someone’s privacy “on or about the premises of another,” with no sexual-motive requirement. Subsection (B), the “voyeurism” offense, requires both that the recording be made “for the purpose of arousing or gratifying sexual desire” and that the subject be “in a place where he would have a reasonable expectation of privacy.” So if you set up a hidden recorder in a neighbor’s house to capture their family argument, you could be charged under subsection (A) even though you weren’t part of the talk and had no sexual motive. Covert recording of a sexual nature in a private place could also be reached by subsection (B).

South Carolina’s wiretap chapter only regulates the interception of spoken words or electronic data. Silent video—no matter where you film it—doesn’t fall under that law. You can legally point a camera at people in your home or theirs as long as you don’t record their voices. The only state law that can reach video is the separate “peeping” statute, § 16-17-470, which targets invasions of privacy in places where people have a reasonable expectation of privacy. That statute has two parts; subsection (A) covers invasions of privacy on another’s premises regardless of motive, while subsection (B) applies only when the recording is made for sexual gratification in a place where the subject has a reasonable expectation of privacy.

Breaking South Carolina’s wiretap law can be a felony punishable by up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine under S.C. Code § 17-30-50. There’s also a misdemeanor path for certain unencrypted radio interceptions. If someone illegally records you, you can sue for $500 per day (or $25,000, whichever is greater), plus attorney fees and punitive damages under § 17-30-135. These penalties apply whether the recording happened in your home or someone else’s. Separately, § 16-17-470 carries its own penalties: subsection (A) is a misdemeanor punishable by up to 3 years imprisonment and/or a fine at the court’s discretion, while subsection (B) is a felony punishable by up to 5 years imprisonment and/or a fine at the court’s discretion.

South Carolina has no statute that specifically bars or authorizes recording on-duty police, so the general one-party-consent wiretap rule governs. Recording your own interaction with an officer is lawful because you are a party to the communication. The Fourth Circuit’s 2023 decision in Sharpe v. Winterville Police Dep’t, 59 F.4th 674 (4th Cir. 2023), held that livestreaming a traffic stop is speech protected by the First Amendment, though the individual officers were granted qualified immunity because the right was not clearly established at the time. The court did not create a stand-alone “right to record” but joined several other circuits recognizing that recording police performing official duties in public is protected speech subject to reasonable time/place/manner limits. No South Carolina statute exempts officers from being recorded, and the wiretap statute does not carve out an exception for law-enforcement encounters.

Imagine you live with two roommates and a loud argument breaks out in the kitchen. You’re standing there talking, so you start recording on your phone to document what’s said. That’s legal under § 17-30-30(C) because you’re a party to the conversation. Later, one roommate claims you broke the law by recording in the apartment. The law doesn’t care that the talk happened in a private home; it only matters that you were part of the talk. The same would be true if you recorded the dispute in your friend’s house while you were visiting—still legal as long as you were a participant. If, instead, you hid a recorder to capture your roommates talking when you weren’t in the room, that could violate § 16-17-470(A) because you weren’t part of that conversation and you invaded privacy on their premises. Covertly recording a sexual nature in a private place could also be reached by § 16-17-470(B).

A bill pending in the South Carolina House would tighten the consent requirement for third-party recordings but would not change the rule for recordings where the person doing the recording is a party to the conversation. House Bill 3593, prefiled on December 12, 2024, would amend § 17-30-30 to require all parties’ consent when a non-participant seeks to record a conversation with only one party’s prior consent. The bill would leave intact the existing permission for a participant to record their own conversations without notice to others. As of July 2025, the bill remains in the House Judiciary Committee with no further action taken.

South Carolina’s professional conduct rules impose stricter limits on attorneys than the state’s one-party-consent wiretap statute. Ethics Advisory Opinion 92-17 (1992) and Opinion 08-13 (2008), interpreting Rule 8.4(d) of the South Carolina Rules of Professional Conduct, hold that a lawyer may not record a conversation without the prior knowledge and consent of all parties when acting in a representative, official, or fiduciary capacity. The only recognized exception is when the recording is made at the request of a law-enforcement agency in a legitimate criminal investigation. For a lawyer acting purely as a private citizen outside any professional role, undisclosed recording is permissible only if it is independently lawful under South Carolina’s one-party-consent statute. These ethics opinions explicitly reject the ABA’s permissive approach in Formal Opinion 01-422 for lawyers in a professional context.