Is It Illegal to Record Someone in the UK?

There is no general law in the UK against recording your own conversations, calls or meetings. Recording becomes a legal problem not at the moment you press record, but at the moment you share, publish or misuse what you captured.

Recording for Personal Use Is Generally Legal

The starting point in UK law is that there is no standalone offence of secretly recording a conversation you are taking part in. If you record a phone call, a face-to-face conversation, or a meeting that you are personally a party to, and you keep that recording for your own personal use, this generally does not breach UK GDPR or the Data Protection Act 2018. The ICO's guidance confirms that processing personal data for purely personal or household purposes, sometimes called the "domestic purposes" exemption, falls outside data protection law's scope.

This means a tenant can record a conversation with a landlord, a consumer can record a call with a company, and a person can record an argument or a meeting they are involved in, without asking permission first. This is a notable contrast with some US states, which operate "two-party consent" rules requiring every participant's agreement before a call can be recorded. The UK has no equivalent blanket consent requirement for personal recording.

The position is different for recording someone else's conversation that you are not part of, particularly covertly and at scale, or for recording that is not for a genuinely personal purpose. The exemption is about domestic, personal use, not a general licence to record anyone about anything.

When Recording Someone Becomes Unlawful

Recording generally stops being a purely personal matter, and starts engaging the law, in a few recurring situations.

Sharing or publishing the recording. Once you move from keeping a recording privately to sharing it, whether that is posting it online, sending it to others, or using it in a way that goes beyond your own personal purposes, you are processing another person's personal data. At that point the domestic purposes exemption can no longer apply, and UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 require a lawful basis for that processing, along with fairness and transparency obligations. This applies with particular force to covert audio recordings of identifiable people, since voice recordings capturing what someone said are personal data in their own right.

Recording by an organisation. A business, employer or other organisation recording individuals, whether that is call recording, meeting recording or workplace monitoring, is not covered by the personal-use exemption at all. Organisations must have a lawful basis under UK GDPR, must generally be transparent about recording (through a privacy notice or similar), and, for phone lines, must also consider communications regulation. This is covered in more detail on our recording conversations at work guide.

Harassment. Recording someone repeatedly, or using recordings to follow, intimidate or pursue them, can amount to harassment under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997, regardless of whether any single recording was itself unlawful to make. The Act does not require physical contact; a course of conduct that causes alarm or distress can be enough.

Going beyond your own space. Recording captured on your own property, such as a home security camera or video doorbell, is treated differently once the camera's field of view extends onto a neighbour's property, a shared path, or the public pavement. See CCTV and doorbell cameras and your neighbours for how that changes the legal position, and our dedicated UK home CCTV and Ring doorbell law guide.

Workplace Recording and Phone Calls

Recording in a work context is governed by more than the personal-use exemption. An employee secretly recording their own meeting for their own records sits closer to the personal-use position described above, though even then the recording can still be excluded or criticised in later proceedings (see below). An employer recording calls or meetings with staff or customers is a different matter entirely: it is organisational processing of personal data, so it needs a lawful basis, appropriate notice, and, for telephone lines, compliance with UK communications rules that govern interception and recording of calls, which sit alongside data protection law. Our recording conversations at work guide and the recording phone calls in the UK guide cover this in depth, including how covertly recorded material is treated by employment tribunals.

Harassment and Family or Employment Cases

Even where recording itself is not a crime, it can still cause problems in a legal dispute. Courts and tribunals in family and employment cases have discretion over what evidence to admit, and a covert recording, especially one obtained by intrusive or repeated surveillance of another person, can be excluded, criticised, or held against the person who made it, even if no criminal offence was committed in making it. Our covert recordings as evidence in UK courts guide sets out how this plays out in practice. Separately, using recording as a tool to harass, stalk or intimidate someone can itself be a criminal matter under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997, independent of any court or tribunal proceedings that later follow.

This article is for general information only and is not legal advice. Whether a specific recording is lawful, admissible, or safe to make depends on its own facts, including who is recording, why, what happens to the recording afterwards, and whether it forms part of a wider pattern of conduct. Anyone facing a specific situation, especially a workplace, family, or harassment matter, should get advice on their own circumstances rather than relying on this page alone. For the wider picture of UK data protection, see the UK Data Privacy hub and the United Kingdom hub.