How to record a Teams meeting

Who can record a Teams meeting?

Recording in Teams depends more on licenses and company policy than on buttons. According to Microsoft's support pages (checked October 2026), you can start a recording if all of these are true:

• You have a qualifying license, such as Microsoft 365 Business, Business Premium or Business Essentials, or Office 365 Enterprise E1, E3, E5, F3, A1, A3 or A5.
• Your IT admin has turned recording on for you, and the organizer's recording policy allows it.
• You're in the same organization as the organizer. Guests and people from other organizations can't start or stop a recording.

The organizer doesn't have to be in the meeting for you to record. With Teams Premium or a Copilot license, the organizer can limit recording to organizers and co-organizers, add presenters, or turn it off for everyone.

Personal Teams accounts

Plain Teams Free can't record. Microsoft has added recording for personal Teams accounts that have a Microsoft 365 Personal, Family or Premium subscription. Those recordings are kept in the cloud for 30 days, so download any you want to keep.

How to record a meeting in Teams, step by step

On the desktop app

1. Join the meeting.
2. In the meeting controls, select More actions (...), then Record.
3. Choose the language people are speaking. Under Choose what to record, pick what you want; choose Audio only if you don't need video.
4. Select Confirm. Everyone in the meeting is told that recording has started, and live transcription starts too.
5. To stop, select More actions > Recording. You can stop the recording and transcript together, or only the transcript.

On a phone

Tap More options, then Start recording. Tap the same place and Stop recording when you're done.

Things to know

• The recording keeps going if the person who started it leaves.
• It stops when everyone has left. If someone forgets to leave, Teams restarts the recording every four hours until the last person goes.
• Depending on where you are, you may need everyone's permission before recording.

Where do Teams recordings go?

Teams doesn't save recordings to your computer. They go to Microsoft's cloud:

• Regular meetings: the organizer's OneDrive for work or school. A link appears in the meeting chat.
• Channel meetings: the channel's files in SharePoint, with a link in the channel conversation.
• Expiration: your admin sets how long recordings are kept. Organizers and co-organizers can change it from the expiration countdown on the video's page, or choose "Remove expiration". After a recording expires, the owner gets an email and has up to 90 days to restore it from the recycle bin.

Guests and people from other organizations can only watch a recording if it's shared with them directly.

Teams transcripts

Recording also turns on transcription. You can transcribe without recording too: More actions > Transcribe, confirm the spoken language, then Confirm. After the meeting, open the meeting in Chat, select Recap, then Transcript, and use Download to save it as .docx or .vtt. By default only organizers and co-organizers can download it. There's a full walkthrough in how to transcribe a Teams meeting.

When you can't record in Teams

Common situations: you're a guest in another company's meeting, your license doesn't include recording, or your admin has turned it off. Your honest options are:

1. Ask the organizer to record and share the recording or transcript with you.
2. Ask your IT admin whether recording can be enabled for your account.
3. Record on your own computer with a desktop recorder that captures your mic and the computer's audio, after telling everyone and getting their OK.

How to record Teams meetings with Hark

Hark is a free desktop app that records meetings on your own computer. It records your microphone and whatever your computer plays, so it works with Teams regardless of your license, whether you're the organizer or a guest. No bot joins the call and nothing is added to the Teams participant list, and the files stay on your computer rather than in someone else's OneDrive.

1. Download Hark and sign in with a free account (an emailed code, no card).
2. Start recording in Hark, then join the Teams meeting. The first recording downloads Hark's speech models (about 730 MB) once.
3. Follow the live transcript and take your own notes as the meeting runs. On Windows, Ctrl+Alt+S grabs a screenshot of shared slides into your notes.
4. Stop when the meeting ends. Hark makes a more accurate transcript and splits it by speaker.
5. Name each voice once and Hark recognises those colleagues in future meetings.

Good to know

• Windows and Linux record both sides of the call. On a Mac, Hark records the microphone only, so other people are captured only if they play through your speakers.
• Hark records audio and screenshots, not video.
• Transcription is English only and runs on your computer. Recording, transcription and speaker recognition are free forever.
• AI meeting notes by Claude are part of the $12/month subscription (new accounts get a 2-day preview). Those send the transcript text, not audio, to Claude.

Comparing options for Teams? See the best AI note takers for Microsoft Teams, or the same guide for Zoom.