How to record a Microsoft Teams meeting

Microsoft Teams has a built-in recording feature that captures the audio, video, and any shared screen from a meeting or call. For a quick internal catch-up or a training session, it's all most people need. This guide covers how to do it step by step, where the file ends up, who is allowed to press record, and the point at which the manual button stops being the right tool — namely, when your organization has a regulatory obligation to capture conversations reliably. If that's where you're headed, jump to compliance recording.

How to record a Teams meeting (native steps)

Recording a Teams meeting from the desktop or web app takes just a few steps. Here is the full sequence:

1. Join or start the meeting.Recording is only available once you are in an active meeting or call — you cannot pre-arm it from the calendar invite.
2. Open the More actions menu. On the meeting controls at the top of the window, click the More actions button, shown as an ellipsis (...).
3. Select Record and transcribe. In the menu, choose Record and transcribe, then click Start recording. On some versions the option reads simply Start recording.
4. Participants see the recording banner. Teams immediately displays a recording notification to everyone in the meeting so they know capture is underway. This banner cannot be hidden.
5. Stop the recording. When you're finished, open the same More actions (...) menu and choose Stop recording. Recording also stops automatically when the last person leaves the meeting.
6. Find it afterward.Teams processes the file and posts a link in the meeting chat. The recording is also saved automatically to OneDrive or SharePoint, depending on the meeting type — more on that below.

Microsoft documents the current behavior in its Teams meeting recording documentation. The exact menu wording changes occasionally as the Teams client is updated, but the flow — More actions, then Record — stays the same.

Who can start a recording

Not everyone in a Teams meeting can press record. In a typical configuration, the meeting organizer and users designated as presenters can start and stop recording, while ordinary attendees cannot. Only one recording runs per meeting at a time, so once someone starts it, the whole meeting is captured in a single file.

Crucially, whether the Record option even appears is governed by your Teams recording policy, which a Microsoft 365 administrator sets. If the button is greyed out or missing for you, that's almost always a policy decision rather than a bug. Administrators can allow or block recording, require it automatically, or restrict who may initiate it. Microsoft's meeting recording admin guide explains the available policy controls.

Where the recording is saved

One of the most common questions after a meeting ends is simply: where did the recording go? Teams stores the file in one of two places, and which one depends on the type of meeting:

• Channel meetings. If the meeting took place in a Teams channel, the recording is saved to the Recordings folder of that channel's SharePoint document library, where every channel member can find it.
• Non-channel meetings and calls.For a scheduled meeting or an ad-hoc call that isn't tied to a channel, the recording is saved to the OneDrive of the person who started the recording, inside a Recordings folder.

The file itself is a standard MP4 that anyone with access can play, download, or share. Because location, permissions, and retention all depend on where the file lands, this matters a lot for governance. We cover the full picture — including default retention behavior and how to find older recordings — in where are Teams recordings stored.

Recording with transcript

When you start a recording through the Record and transcribe option, Teams can also generate a live transcriptalongside the recording. The transcript captures the spoken content as text, attributed to speakers, and can be turned on or off independently of the recording. After the meeting, the transcript is stored with the recording and can be searched, read, or downloaded — useful for quickly locating a specific moment without scrubbing through the video.

Native transcription is convenient, but it's tied to whoever remembered to enable it and inherits the same storage and retention limits as the recording. For organizations that need reliable, searchable transcripts of every conversation, automatic transcription with speaker labelling should be built into the recording pipeline rather than toggled per meeting. That's exactly how our transcription feature works.

The limits of manual recording

For everyday meetings, the native Record button is perfectly good. For anything where the recording is evidence — a regulated conversation, a customer commitment, a dispute waiting to happen — manual recording has structural gaps you should understand before you rely on it:

• It depends on someone remembering.Every recorded call requires a person to press Start recording. One forgotten click means one uncaptured conversation, and in an audit that's often exactly the call you needed.
• It isn't governed by policy. Native recording is a per-meeting choice, not an enforced organizational rule. An in-scope user can simply decline to record, and nothing stops them.
• It produces a single mixed track. Native recordings blend all voices together, which makes accurate attribution on busy multi-party calls difficult when you need to prove who said what.
• Default storage and retention aren't compliance-grade.Files land in a user's OneDrive or a channel's SharePoint with default retention settings, not in a governed archive built around a specific regulatory obligation.

None of these are flaws in Teams — the Record button was never designed to be a compliance system. They simply mark the boundary where a different approach is needed.

When you need compliance recording instead

If your organization operates under rules like HIPAA, FINRA, SEC Rule 17a-4, Dodd-Frank, or MiFID II, you can't leave call capture to whoever remembers to press a button. The answer is compliance recording: automatic, policy-based capture that an administrator assigns to in-scope users. From that moment, every call those users make or receive is recorded automatically, with no button to press and no way to quietly opt out. Participants still see the Teams recording banner, so notification is preserved.

Microsoft provides the compliance recording policy framework, and a certified recording application does the actual capturing. Our service provides and fully manages that application on a dedicated, US-hosted server — recording every in-scope call, producing per-participant audio and searchable transcripts, and archiving everything to your own Microsoft 365 tenant. See Microsoft Teams compliance recording for the full service, and automatic recording for how policy-based capture removes the human step entirely.

Frequently asked questions