Recording Law for Recording at Home in Texas

Texas lets you record any conversation you take part in without telling the other person, subject to one exception. This is called "one-party consent." The rule comes from the Texas wiretap law, Penal Code § 16.02. It says you can record if you are a party to the conversation or have the okay of one party, unless the interception is made for the purpose of committing a separate unlawful act. This applies whether the conversation happens in your home, someone else's home, at work, or in public. The law treats all locations the same. The key point: if you are part of the chat, you can record it without warning the others.

Not every chat is protected under the wiretap law. Texas courts use a "legitimate expectation of privacy" test to decide if a conversation is covered. This test asks two things: Did the speaker show a subjective expectation that the conversation wouldn't be intercepted? And is that expectation one society would see as reasonable? Courts look at several factors, including whether the place was private, who could access it, and if the speaker took steps to keep the talk private. Texas courts apply a six-factor totality-of-the-circumstances test drawn from Granados v. State, 85 S.W.3d 217, 223 (Tex. Crim. App. 2002): (1) whether the person had a proprietary or possessory interest in the place; (2) whether the person's presence there was legitimate; (3) whether the person had a right to exclude others; (4) whether the person took normal precautions to protect privacy; (5) whether the place was put to private use; and (6) whether the privacy claim is consistent with historical notions of privacy. For example, a loud argument in a public park usually isn't protected, but a private talk in a locked office might be. The leading Texas case is Long v. State, 535 S.W.3d 511 (Tex. Crim. App. 2017), which adopted this test and held that the statutory phrase "an expectation that the communication is not subject to interception under circumstances justifying that expectation" in Tex. Code Crim. Proc. art. 18A.001(19) incorporates the Fourth Amendment's legitimate-expectation-of-privacy standard. The statute defines "oral communication" as "an oral communication uttered by a person exhibiting an expectation that the communication is not subject to interception under circumstances justifying that expectation."

If you record only video with no sound, Texas law doesn't restrict it. The wiretap statutes only cover "communications" that include audio. Penal Code § 16.02 and the civil counterpart, Civil Practice & Remedies Code chapter 123 (§§ 123.001–123.004), define "interception" as capturing the "aural" (sound) part of a conversation. Silent video doesn't capture sound, so it falls outside these laws. The only Texas law that applies to silent video is Penal Code § 21.15, which bans invasive visual recording in intimate areas or bathrooms with intent to invade privacy.

You can record a conversation in someone else's home if you are part of it, just like anywhere else in Texas. The one-party consent rule applies the same way. There is no special rule that makes recording at someone else's home riskier. The only exception is if you secretly record in a bedroom, bathroom, or changing room with the intent to invade someone's privacy—that's covered by Penal Code § 21.15, a narrow voyeurism law expanded in 2015 to include bedrooms. Otherwise, if you're part of the conversation, you can record it without telling the others.

Texas has no law that bans recording on-duty police in public. Penal Code § 38.15 makes it a crime to interfere with public duties, but it includes a defense: if the only thing you did was speak (like recording), that alone isn't interference. Courts have also ruled that the First Amendment protects recording police performing their duties in public. In Turner v. Driver, 848 F.3d 678 (5th Cir. 2017), the Fifth Circuit held that this right exists, though it wasn't "clearly established" for incidents before February 2017. Texas is in the Fifth Circuit, so this ruling applies here. Texas lawmakers considered, but did not pass, a no-filming buffer zone around officers in 2015 (HB 2918). The statute was most recently amended by Acts 2025, 89th Leg., R.S., Ch. 478 (S.B. 482), eff. Sept. 1, 2025, which added utility-company employees/agents to the protected class and made the offense eligible for disaster-area punishment enhancement—unrelated to filming.

Texas regulates the capture and use of biometric identifiers, including voiceprints, under the Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier Act (CUBI), Tex. Bus. & Com. Code Ann. § 503.001. The law defines a "biometric identifier" to include a "voiceprint," defined as "a retina or iris scan, fingerprint, voiceprint, or record of hand or face geometry." Before capturing a biometric identifier for a commercial purpose, a person must inform the individual and obtain consent, protect it with reasonable care, may not sell/lease/disclose except narrow carve-outs, and must destroy it within a reasonable time, not later than the first anniversary of when the collection purpose expires (employer/security-purpose collection: purpose expires at termination). Enforcement is exclusively by the Texas Attorney General, who may bring an action for a civil penalty of not more than $25,000 for each violation; there is no private right of action. CUBI was amended in 2025 by H.B. 149 (the Texas Responsible AI Governance Act, eff. Jan. 1, 2026) to add exemptions for the training, processing, or storage of biometric identifiers involved in developing, training, evaluating, disseminating, or otherwise offering artificial intelligence models or systems, unless the system is used or deployed for the purpose of uniquely identifying a specific individual, and for AI systems deployed for security-incident/fraud/identity-theft/harassment prevention or investigation purposes. The amendment also clarifies that publicly-available internet images/media of a person do not constitute "informed consent" unless the individual themself made that image public, and adds a claw-back provision: if a biometric identifier captured under the AI-training exemption is later used for a commercial purpose outside the exemption, full CUBI possession/destruction/penalty rules reattach. These provisions are directly relevant to devices that process voice data for identification or authentication.

Texas lawyers may record conversations without telling the other party, provided the recording is legal under Texas's one-party consent wiretap statute and does not violate any representation made to the other person. The State Bar of Texas Professional Ethics Committee, Opinion No. 575 (November 2006), interpreting Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct Rule 8.04(a)(3), concluded that undisclosed recording is not a per se ethics violation if it complies with applicable law and does not involve a serious criminal offense. The opinion sets out four conditions: (1) recordings of conversations involving a client are made to further a legitimate purpose of the lawyer or the client; (2) confidential client information contained in any recording is appropriately protected by the lawyer in accordance with Rule 1.05; (3) the undisclosed recording does not constitute a serious criminal violation under the laws of any jurisdiction applicable to the conversation recorded; and (4) the recording is not contrary to a representation made by the lawyer to any person. Opinions 392 and 514, which previously prohibited undisclosed recording, were overruled. The opinion reasons that because persons in Texas are generally not prohibited from making undisclosed recordings of their telephone conversations and that many businesses routinely record telephone conversations on business premises with or without notice, an undisclosed recording by a party to the call cannot be termed "dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation" under Rule 8.04(a)(3), absent more.