How to record a Teams meeting, and what to do when you're a guest

How to record a Teams meeting depends mostly on two things, at least on a work or school account: which organisation you belong to, and what role you have in the meeting. If you work at the company that set up the call, you're the organiser, a co-organiser or a presenter, and your admin allows recording, you can press Record. If you joined as a guest or from another company, Teams won't let you record at all, whatever plan you're on.

This guide covers what Microsoft's support pages said on 13 November 2026 about starting a recording, who's allowed to, where the file goes, how long it's kept, and what to do when the button is locked. If all you need is the text of the meeting, read how to transcribe a Teams meeting without recording it instead.

How to record a Teams meeting

On the Teams desktop app:

1. Start or join the meeting.
2. Select More actions, then Record, in the meeting controls.
3. Pick the spoken language and what you want to record.
4. Select Confirm.

The recording doesn't start until you press Confirm. Microsoft's troubleshooting page says that if you closed that dialog, or never saw a message in the chat saying the recording had started, the recording probably never began and can't be recovered.

For sound only, follow the same steps and choose Audio only from the Choose what to record menu. To stop, go to More actions, then Recording. Stopping the recording also stops live transcription; you can stop just the transcription and leave the recording running.

On the Teams mobile app, tap More options, then Start recording, and More options, then Stop recording, when you're done. The file is processed and saved to OneDrive or SharePoint the same way.

Before you rely on it, note what Microsoft says about how recordings behave:

• Only one person can record a meeting at a time.
• The recording carries on if the person who started it leaves. It stops once everyone has left, and if someone forgets to hang up it ends and restarts every four hours until the last person goes.
• It won't capture more than four people's video at once, whiteboards and annotations, shared notes, content shared by an app, or videos and animations embedded in PowerPoint Live.

Who can record a Teams meeting

On a work or school account, you can record if all of these are true:

• You have one of the licences Microsoft lists: Office 365 Enterprise E1, E3, E5, F3, A1, A3, A5, or Microsoft 365 Business, Business Premium or Business Essentials.
• Your IT admin has recording turned on for you. Both the organiser and the person recording need recording permission.
• You aren't a guest and you aren't from another organisation.
• Your role in the meeting allows it. In Microsoft's roles table, organisers, co-organisers and presenters can start or stop a recording. Attendees can't.

The organiser doesn't have to be in the meeting for someone else to record it.

Organisers with Teams Premium or a Copilot licence get an extra control. In the meeting's Options, under Recording and transcription, Who can record and transcribe can be set to organisers and co-organisers; organisers, co-organisers and presenters; or no one.

One less obvious lock: if the organiser sets Allow Copilot to Off in the meeting options, Microsoft says the Record button isn't available to any attendees. More on Copilot's settings in does Microsoft Teams have an AI note taker?

Can a guest record a Teams meeting?

No. This is the table in Microsoft's recording guide:

Type of user	Can start recording?	Can stop recording?
Meeting organizer	Yes	Yes
Person from same org	Yes	Yes
Person from another org or company	No	No
Guest	No	No
Anonymous	No	No

Federated users (people from another organisation who reach you through Teams external access) can record calls but not meetings. Microsoft's admin docs make one exception: if someone from another organisation has a compliance recording policy, their organisation's system records the meeting, and the organiser, co-organisers and presenters are told so they can remove that person if they object.

So if you're the consultant, the candidate, the client or the vendor on someone else's Teams call, the Record button will show a lock. Microsoft's advice is to ask someone from the organiser's organisation to record and share the file afterwards. Guests and external attendees can only watch a recording when it's explicitly shared with them through a direct link.

Recording on a personal Teams account

Personal Teams accounts (the free consumer version) have different rules. Record meeting is only for Microsoft 365 Personal, Family or Premium subscribers. Any participant with one of those subscriptions can start and stop a recording, and the organiser doesn't have to attend. Participants without the subscription, people on a business or enterprise plan, and anyone not signed in with a personal Teams account can't. One difference from work accounts: on a personal account, the recording stops if the person who started it leaves the meeting.

The recording appears in the meeting chat and expires 30 days after it's saved. Watching it doesn't reset the clock, so download it if you want to keep it. Microsoft also says that if one of the participants is a minor, their audio and video are disabled in the recording.

Where Teams recordings go

For most meetings, the recording is saved to a Recordings folder in the organiser's OneDrive for Business. For a channel meeting, it goes to the channel's SharePoint site, on the channel's Files tab. Outside channels, that means the recording belongs to the organiser, even if you pressed Record.

You can find it in three places:

• The meeting chat, under the Shared tab.
• Your Teams calendar: open the past meeting and select Recap.
• For channel meetings, the channel conversation and its Files tab.

Everyone invited to the meeting can view the recording. Only the organiser and co-organisers can edit it.

If Teams can't upload the file to OneDrive or SharePoint, it holds it in temporary storage for up to 21 days. Download it, or fix the storage problem and retry the upload, before then. After that it's deleted for good.

How to download a Teams meeting recording

1. Open the meeting chat or channel and select the Shared tab.
2. Find and select the recording.
3. Select More options, then Download.

Microsoft's own pages disagree slightly on who gets the Download option. The download guide says only the meeting organiser can download; the recording guide says organisers and co-organisers can by default. If you can't see it, ask the organiser to download it for you or to share it with download allowed. When sharing from Stream, an organiser can set each link to Can't download, Can view (which allows downloading) or Can edit.

How long Teams keeps recordings

On work and school accounts, new meeting recordings expire after 120 days by default. Admins can change that number or turn expiry off; changes only apply to new recordings. For A1 education users, the default can't be set above 30 days.

The organiser and co-organisers can change the date on a single recording. Open it from the meeting chat in the browser player, select the expiration countdown under the video, and pick a new timeframe or Remove expiration. When a recording does expire, the owner gets an email and has up to 90 days to recover it from the recycle bin. Once it's purged from there, it's gone.

Why can't I record a Teams meeting?

When Start recording is greyed out, hover over the lock icon. Microsoft's troubleshooting page matches each tooltip to a cause:

Tooltip says	What it means
Only people in this org can start recording	You're a guest, anonymous, or from another organisation
Unavailable for this meeting due to organization policy	Your admin hasn't allowed you to record meetings, or just changed the policy and it hasn't applied yet
Unavailable in this meeting	The organiser isn't allowed to record, so nobody in the meeting can
Only meeting organizer and co-organizer can start recording	The organiser limited Who can record and transcribe
Unavailable because the meeting organizer has disabled recording	Who can record and transcribe is set to No one
Only meeting organizers and presenters can start recording	You're an attendee, not a presenter
Unavailable because Copilot is turned off for this meeting	The organiser set Allow Copilot to Off

Most of these come down to asking the organiser to change your role or the meeting option, or asking IT to change the policy. For the first one, Microsoft's only suggestions are to sign in with an account from the organiser's organisation, if you have one, or to ask someone there to record and share it.

Recording a Teams meeting outside Teams

If you're a guest and the organiser is fine with you keeping your own copy, the recording has to happen on your computer. Teams doesn't see that, so it won't show anyone a notice. Read the section on consent below before you do it.

The screen recorder built into your computer

On a Mac, press Shift-Command-5 and choose to record the whole screen, a part of it, or (on macOS Tahoe 26 and later) a single window. Check Options before you start. Include System Audio, the setting that picks up the other people's voices, needs macOS 27 Golden Gate or later; on older versions you can only choose a microphone, which won't hear the call if you're wearing headphones. Recordings save to the desktop by default.

On Windows 11, open Snipping Tool and press Windows logo key + Shift + R, select the area, and select Start. Record a short test call and play it back before a meeting you care about, to make sure the other side's voices are there.

Either way you get a video file. The Mac recorder makes no transcript; on Windows, Snipping Tool can send the video to Clipchamp to generate captions.

A notetaker bot

Cloud notetakers record Teams by joining the call as an extra participant. Otter's help centre, for example, says its Notetaker "joins Microsoft Teams meetings as an anonymous guest and cannot sign in with a Microsoft account". So the organisation's Teams settings have to allow anonymous users, someone may have to admit the bot from the lobby, and Teams may label it Unverified in the participant list. Otter also notes that meetings hosted by another organisation follow that organisation's policies, which can stop the bot getting in. As a guest, those settings belong to the host's organisation, not to you. Where Otter stores what it records is covered in is Otter.ai safe?, and if you're the organiser trying to keep bots out, see how to stop AI notetaker bots joining meetings.

A desktop app that records the audio

If you need what was said and can live without the picture, an app that records the call audio on your computer is enough. It takes what your computer plays and what your microphone hears, so it doesn't care what role you have or whose tenant the meeting is in.

Then check where the audio goes next. Some bot-free apps upload it for transcription; a local app keeps the recording and the transcript on your own disk. The difference is laid out in AI note takers that don't join your meeting.

Tell people you're recording

Teams' own recording announces itself. Microsoft says every participant gets a notification in the desktop, web or mobile app as soon as a recording starts, and its support page adds that, depending on your region, you may need everyone's permission before you record them.

A screen recorder or desktop app gives the other people no signal, and the absence of a Teams banner isn't consent. In the US, all-party consent states generally need everyone on the call to agree, and other countries have their own rules. Start with our two-party consent states guide, check the law where the other people are, and say at the start of the call that you're recording. If the organiser has switched recording off for the meeting, treat that as their answer and ask before you record any other way.

Where Private Notetaker fits

Private Notetaker is the desktop-app route. It runs on Windows 10 and 11 (64-bit) and on Apple Silicon Macs. Open it before the call and press record. It captures the Teams audio as it plays on your computer, so it works in meetings other people organise and in tenants where recording is switched off. Personal Teams accounts work too. Afterwards you have the recording, a transcript, notes and action items as files on your disk. Nothing joins the call and nothing is uploaded, and it keeps working with the network off.

It captures the call audio, so if you need the shared screen or the faces on file, use Teams' Record button or a screen recorder. It transcribes English only, and there's no shared team library. If you're the organiser and your colleagues expect the recording in OneDrive with the meeting chat, Teams' own recording is the simpler choice.

For the rest, see how Private Notetaker works with Microsoft Teams, compare it with Otter, or download the 7-day free trial. No card is needed. After that it's $15 a month or $149 once. The same questions for other platforms are in how to record a Zoom meeting and how to record Google Meet.

Teams behaviour is from Microsoft's support articles "Start, stop, and find meeting recordings in Microsoft Teams", "I can't record a meeting in Microsoft Teams", "Play, share, and download a meeting recording in Microsoft Teams", "Roles in a Teams meeting" and "Manage meeting and call recordings in Microsoft Teams for personal use", and Microsoft Learn's "Manage Teams recording policies for meetings and events" and "Manage Teams recording expiration policy". Mac steps are from Apple's "How to record the screen on Mac", and the Windows shortcut is from Microsoft's "Use Snipping Tool to capture screenshots". Otter's behaviour is from Otter's help article "Set up Otter Notetaker to join Microsoft Teams Meeting". All checked 13 November 2026. Nothing here is legal advice.