Not legal advice: This article covers general business-practice awareness, not a legal audit. The amendment's final enforcement details, its exact start date and the applicable penalties can still change before March 2027 — confirm your own obligations with a licensed Israeli attorney before relying on anything here.
Starting March 22, 2027, a business in Israel that sells certain goods and services by phone has to do three things it never had to do before: tell the customer the call is being recorded, actually record it, and hand over a copy within 10 business days if the customer asks. The rule comes from Amendment No. 74 to the Consumer Protection Law — published in the Official Gazette on July 22, 2026, and already being called "Amendment 73" by a good share of the press that covered it while it was still a bill. It applies to phone sales worth ₪750 or more (or of unknown value) in a defined list of sectors, plus — with no price floor at all — to marketing calls from banks, insurers and licensed financial-service providers.
None of that required a new right to record calls. Israel has let a participant record their own conversation without telling the other side since 1979. What the amendment does is invert who carries the burden: miss your own recording-and-retention duty, and in a dispute, a court simply treats the consumer's account of the call as the true one.
We went through the amendment's own gazette text, five law-firm summaries, three outlets' news coverage of the Knesset vote, and the closest equivalent US and UK rules, to find out exactly which calls are covered, what retention and delivery actually require, and where even the professionals writing about this law can't agree with each other.
Key takeaways
- Israel's Consumer Protection Law now requires certain businesses to record sales calls, disclose the recording to the customer, keep it, and hand over a copy on request — not permission to record, an obligation to. It takes effect March 22, 2027, eight months after its July 22, 2026 publication, with up to a four-month regulatory deferral still possible.
- The duty applies to calls about a defined list of transaction types (the Ninth Schedule — non-food goods sales, loan brokerage, lost-fund searches, medical or tax-refund eligibility checks, telecom/internet/broadcast services, credit-data services, maintenance contracts, gas supply) worth ₪750 or more, or of unknown value — plus, with no minimum price at all, outbound marketing calls from banks, insurers, insurance agents and licensed financial-service providers.
- The law's own Official Gazette text is titled "Amendment No. 74," even though most Hebrew press still calls it "Amendment 73" from its time as a bill. Sources also disagreed on whether it covers calls the consumer initiates — the statutory text itself settles this: it does, explicitly covering calls in both directions.
- Reported per-violation penalties don't agree between outlets, and we traced the discrepancy to the statute itself: the Consumer Protection Law's own consolidated text sets the 2026-indexed penalty at ₪53,070 for a corporation and ₪29,490 otherwise, which matches Walla's and Hidabroot's reporting exactly. Ynet's figures (₪14,750 / ₪26,500) and Mako's (₪7,000 / ₪22,500, plus ₪50,000 for banks) don't match the law.
- This didn't require new permission to record in the first place: Israel has been a one-party-consent country for recording your own conversations since the Secret Monitoring Law of 1979. What's new is the opposite obligation — record, disclose, retain for two years (or six months if no deal closes), and hand over a copy within 10 business days, free the first time.
- The US and UK rules we checked don't mirror this combination. The FTC's Telemarketing Sales Rule extended call-record retention to five years in 2024 but doesn't mandate recording ordinary sales-call audio or give consumers a right to request it; the UK's FCA rules mandate call recording only for specific regulated financial activity, not retail sales generally. A general right to request your own data under GDPR Article 15 exists in the EU and UK, but it's a privacy right invoked case by case, not a point-of-sale rule with a fixed 10-day deadline.
What does Israel's new call-recording law actually require?
Amendment No. 74 to the Consumer Protection Law adds a new section — on recording, storing and delivering sales calls — to the main statute. It was approved by the Knesset in its second and third readings on July 17, 2026 with 18 votes in favor and none against, published in the Official Gazette (Reshumot) five days later, and takes effect eight months after that: March 22, 2027. The ministers of economy and finance can still push the date back by up to four more months, with the Knesset's Economic Affairs Committee signing off.
The core mechanics are consistent across every source we checked: record the qualifying call, tell the customer at the start that it's recorded and that they can ask for a copy, keep the recording for a set period, and produce it within 10 business days of a request — the first copy free. The ₪750 threshold itself also drifted during drafting: the explanatory notes attached to an earlier version of the bill proposed a ₪500 floor, before the enacted text settled on ₪750 — a reminder that an early news write-up of a still-pending bill can describe a detail the final law later changed.
| Requirement | What the amendment requires |
|---|---|
| Official title | Consumer Protection Law (Amendment No. 74), 5786-2026 — also cited as "Amendment 73" and, in earlier Knesset committee materials, "Amendment 70" |
| Published | Official Gazette (Reshumot), July 22, 2026 |
| Takes effect | March 22, 2027 — the ministers of economy and finance may postpone it by up to 4 more months, with Economic Affairs Committee approval |
| Threshold | ₪750 or more in total transaction value, or any amount if the price isn't yet known when the call happens |
| Must record | Every qualifying outbound sales call, including ones made electronically |
| Must disclose | At the start of the call: that it's recorded, and that the customer may request a copy |
| Must retain | At least 2 years if a deal was concluded on the call; at least 6 months if it wasn't; longer while a request is pending |
| Must deliver | A copy plus written call-date details within 10 business days of a request; the first copy is free |
| If the business doesn't comply | In a civil dispute, the customer's version of the call is treated as correct unless a court allows the business to rebut it |
~5 months
how far March 22, 2027 is from today — and worth rechecking, since the law lets the ministers of economy and finance postpone specific commencement by up to four more months with Knesset committee approval.
Source: Consumer Protection Law (Amendment No. 74), 5786-2026, Official Gazette, July 22, 2026
Could businesses already record these calls? What's actually new here?
Yes — and this is the part most coverage of the law skips. Israel has been a one-party-consent jurisdiction for recording conversations since the Secret Monitoring Law, 5739-1979: a participant in a call can record it without telling anyone else on the line, and that's been true for decades, independent of this amendment. The Protection of Privacy Law, 5741-1981 then governs what happens to that recording afterward — how it's stored, who can see it, what it can be used for.
So the amendment isn't granting a new permission; businesses already had the legal room to record their own sales calls quietly. What it adds is the opposite: a duty to record, a duty to say so out loud at the start of the call, a duty to keep the recording for a defined period, and — this is the genuinely new part — a duty to hand a copy to the customer who asks for it, on a fixed 10-business-day clock. One law firm's summary of the amendment notes explicitly that it doesn't override the 1981 privacy statute; the two now operate side by side.
The practical shift is informational, not technical: nothing about how a business physically records a call changes. What changes is who gets to see the recording afterward, and how fast they're entitled to see it.
Which calls are actually covered — and which aren't?
The duty attaches to transactions listed in a new Ninth Schedule to the law, where the total price is ₪750 or more — or, notably, where the price simply isn't known yet at the time of the call, which the law treats as meeting the threshold by default rather than exempting it.
- Sale of goods, other than food, following a telemarketing approach
- Loan brokerage, and locating or recovering lost funds (a category that explicitly includes searches for unclaimed pension payouts)
- Checking medical-condition-based rights or tax-refund eligibility, unless performed by a licensed accountant or tax advisor
- Telecom, internet, broadcast-reception and related end-equipment services
- Services to improve, fix or delete a person's credit-rating data, unless performed by a licensed credit-data body
- Ongoing maintenance or repair contracts
- Ongoing medical or nursing-care service contracts
- Gas supply
Sources disagreed on one point, and the statute settles it: a law firm's summary of the amendment describes it as covering calls the consumer initiates as well as ones the business makes, while a news outlet's coverage of the Knesset vote said only business-initiated marketing calls count. Section 16ד(א)(1)'s own text requires recording "every voice call to a phone number... including such a call from the consumer to the business or to someone on its behalf" — the duty runs both ways. The news coverage claiming it's business-initiated calls only was wrong on this point.
What has to happen when a customer asks for their recording?
The retention clock isn't one blanket number — it depends on how the call ended. Every source we checked agrees on the split: two years if a transaction was concluded on the call, six months if it wasn't, and longer than either if a customer's request for the recording is still pending when the normal retention period would otherwise run out.
Delivery itself is fast and front-loaded: 10 business days from the request, with the first copy free and a written list of call dates included. A business can reportedly charge a "reasonable" fee only for a repeat request for the same call — and, separately, generally cannot use its own recording as evidence against the consumer without a court's permission, which cuts the other way against turning this into a one-sided surveillance tool.
How much does violating this actually cost?
This is where our sources stopped agreeing with each other — and we kept digging until we found the actual answer in the statute itself. Ynet's coverage of the amendment reports a per-violation penalty of ₪14,750 for a business (עוסק) and ₪26,500 for a corporation (תאגיד). Mako's coverage of the same Knesset vote reports roughly ₪7,000 for an individual and ₪22,500 for a corporation, plus a separate, higher ₪50,000 figure specifically for banks. Walla and Hidabroot report yet different numbers in their own coverage of the same amendment: up to ₪29,490 per violation for a non-corporate business and up to ₪53,070 for a corporation. None of the four articles links the underlying fine schedule, and a Knesset PDF of the gazette text and a Chamber of Commerce legal-summary PDF both failed to load for us. What resolved it was Wikisource's consolidated, continuously updated text of the Consumer Protection Law, which already shows Amendment 74's insertions with their exact effective dates. Section 16ד is the amendment's own new section — "חובת הקלטת שיחות, שמירתן ומסירתן לצרכן" (the duty to record, keep and deliver calls to the consumer), in force from March 22, 2027 — and section 22ג(ב), the law's administrative-sanctions list, explicitly names five separate 16ד violations (failing to record, failing to disclose, failing to retain, failing to deliver, and improperly charging for a copy), all under one tier. That tier's amount is set at a 2015 base of ₪45,000 for a corporation and ₪25,000 otherwise, indexed each year — and for 2026, the statute states the indexed figures directly: ₪53,070 and ₪29,490. Those are exactly Walla and Hidabroot's numbers. Ynet's and Mako's figures don't match the statute at all.
| Israeli consumer-marketing law | Penalty | Legal mechanism |
|---|---|---|
| Communications Law §30A ("Spam Law") | Up to ₪1,000 per message | Civil statutory damages, no proof of harm needed |
| Do-Not-Call registry, Amendment 61 (2020) | ₪46,080 in older legal-practice summaries; the law's own text confirms the current (2026-indexed) figure is ₪53,070 (corporate) / ₪29,490 (not) — ₪46,080 is a superseded value from an earlier indexation year. A real 2026 enforcement case against Partner, a telecom, shows ₪184,320 before a 20% reduction to ₪147,456 | Administrative fine |
| Privacy Protection Law, Amendment 13 | Up to ₪10,000 per violation | Civil statutory damages, no proof of harm needed |
| Consumer Protection Law, Amendment 74 (this law) | ₪53,070 (corporate) / ₪29,490 (not), per violation — confirmed directly in the statute (section 22ג(ב), covering the five violations of the amendment's new section 16ד). Ynet (₪14,750/₪26,500) and Mako (₪7,000/₪22,500, banks ₪50,000) both reported figures that don't match the law | Administrative fine, confirmed from the consolidated statutory text |
Non-corporate business (עוסק)
Corporation (תאגיד)
The comparison above mixes two different legal mechanisms — court-awarded civil damages versus administrative fines — so treat it as context for scale, not a like-for-like ranking. The Spam Law and Amendment 13 figures are drawn from oToK's own compliance guides to each law. We re-verified the Do-Not-Call figure independently for this piece rather than just trusting the inherited number, and the statute itself settled it: the Consumer Protection Law's consolidated text, as maintained on Wikisource with Amendment 74's own insertions already reflected, states the 2026-indexed figure directly — ₪53,070 for a corporation and ₪29,490 otherwise, under section 22ג(ב), a 2015 base of ₪45,000/₪25,000 updated annually. ₪46,080 is a real figure, just an older indexed year's value that several legal-practice guides (and this site's own existing article) hadn't updated. A real July 2026 enforcement case (the Authority's intended ₪184,320 sanction against Partner, a national telecom, reduced 20% to ₪147,456) is roughly consistent with a per-violation base somewhere in this range, though we didn't try to reconstruct the exact arithmetic behind that specific case. The same ₪53,070/₪29,490 tier also governs the five violations Amendment 74 added under its new section 16ד, which is why Walla and Hidabroot's reported figures for the new call-recording law are correct and Ynet's and Mako's are not.
Why did lawmakers push this now?
Sources don't fully agree on how the bill came together, either. A Chamber of Commerce legal update describes it as a government bill led by the Consumer Protection and Fair Trade Authority, to which two similar private member's bills — from MKs Merav Cohen and Iman Khatib-Yassin — were formally attached; a Mako report instead describes three merged private bills, adding Economic Affairs Committee chair David Bitan as a third sponsor. What both agree on: Bitan, chairing the committee, pushed to extend the duty to banks, insurers and pension advisers with no price floor at all, reportedly saying he wasn't willing to give banks and insurers a discount from the rule. By one outlet's account the underlying idea took roughly 15 years to work its way through the Knesset in various forms before this version passed 18–0 on July 17, 2026. MK Merav Cohen said the bill was built on an analysis of thousands of consumer complaints; Anita Yitzhak, deputy head of the Consumer Protection and Fair Trade Authority, pointed to the creativity of phone-sales scammers as a reason the law was needed, noting that most victims don't realize how much they're losing.
One of the Ninth Schedule's own covered categories makes the point concretely: "locating lost funds" firms, which track down unclaimed pension payouts and old accounts for a fee, reportedly numbered around 13 companies doing more than ₪500 million in business in 2023 alone, commonly charging around a 20% finder's fee — meaning a ₪150,000 recovered pension can cost its owner roughly ₪30,000, before tax, to a phone call they may not have fully understood.
₪500M+
the scale of Israel's "locate your lost pension funds" industry in 2023 alone, by one report — a category now on the law's covered list, where a roughly 20% finder's fee on a ₪150,000 recovered pension means losing about ₪30,000 of it to a single phone call.
Source: Mako news coverage of the Knesset vote (2026), citing figures discussed by the Consumer Protection and Fair Trade Authority
Support wasn't universal. Avir Kara, founder of the "Ani Shulman" consumer movement and a former MK, argued the law burdens honest businesses with new recording, storage and legal costs that get passed to customers while the actual fraudsters simply ignore it, and called for stronger enforcement instead of a new blanket duty. Privacy lawyer Amir Zolti separately warned that voice recordings could be classified as biometric data under Israeli privacy rules, which would trigger heavier data-security obligations disproportionately costly for small businesses.
Is Israel unusual here? How the US and UK handle the same question
We checked the closest equivalents in two markets often cited as having stricter consumer-protection rules, and neither mirrors this specific combination: a mandatory recording duty for ordinary retail and services sales calls, paired with a fast, free, no-justification-needed right for the customer to get a copy.
| Jurisdiction | Must record sales calls? | Can the customer request a copy? | Retention required |
|---|---|---|---|
| Israel — Consumer Protection Law, Amendment 74 | Yes, for covered retail/telecom/gas/financial sales calls ₪750+ | Yes — within 10 business days, first copy free | 2 years if a deal closed, 6 months if not |
| United States — FTC Telemarketing Sales Rule | No mandate to record sales-call audio; call-detail records only (number, time, duration, disposition) | No general consumer right to request it | 5 years for records (raised from 2 years in a 2024 amendment) |
| United Kingdom — FCA rules (e.g. CMCOB 2.3, SYSC 10A) | Yes, but only for specific FCA-regulated financial activity, not retail sales generally | Not a standalone right under these specific rules | About 6–12 months, depending on the specific FCA rule |
| EU / UK — GDPR Article 15 (general privacy right) | No recording mandate — this is a request right, not a recording duty | Yes in principle, if the recording holds the requester's personal data; at least two national regulators have required a usable copy, not just playback | Response due within 1 month, extendable to 3 — no fixed retention duty from this right alone |
Sources: the FTC's 2024 Telemarketing Sales Rule amendment (via Husch Blackwell and Olshan's law-firm coverage); the UK FCA Handbook's CMCOB 2.3 claims-management rules directly, with SYSC 10A and COBS 11.8 drawn from secondary vendor summaries we couldn't verify against the current Handbook text; and Lithuanian and Swedish data-protection-authority decisions on GDPR Article 15 access requests, as summarized in EDPB case materials. This is a comparison of the closest rules we could verify, not a claim that no stricter regime exists anywhere — only that the two markets most often invoked in these comparisons don't clearly have Israel's specific combination of a mandatory sales-call recording duty plus a fast, free consumer delivery right.
What should a business actually do before March 22, 2027?
- 1List every transaction type your business sells by phone against the Ninth Schedule categories above. If any of them can cross ₪750, treat every outbound sales call in that line of business as covered by default — an unknown price counts as over the threshold, not under it.
- 2Build the start-of-call disclosure into the script or dialer itself, so every agent says it the same way every time, rather than relying on memory.
- 3Set up recording and storage tied to the specific customer and call, so a request can actually be matched to the right recording inside the 10-business-day window.
- 4Track retention by outcome, not on one blanket timer — a closed deal needs two years, an unclosed one needs six months, and a pending request can extend either.
- 5Confirm the exact disclosure wording, retention mechanics and penalty exposure with an Israeli lawyer well before March 22, 2027 — the sources behind this article don't even agree with each other on the fine amounts, let alone your specific obligations.
oToK's CRM logs every call against the matching contact and deal on every plan, including Free, with follow-up tasks and a call automation trigger — useful for seeing which conversations cross the ₪750 line and need to be tracked under the new rules. On Growth and up, the Extra Mobile telephony integration adds automatic call recording tied to that same contact timeline. Neither one is a compliance guarantee on its own: the law's specific disclosure wording, retention clock and delivery process are still a business's own responsibility to implement and verify.
Frequently asked questions
- Is this law "Amendment 73" or "Amendment 74" to the Consumer Protection Law?
- It's been called at least three numbers across its legislative life: Knesset committee materials from 2025 title it "Amendment No. 70," most Hebrew press covered it as "Amendment 73" during 2026's second and third readings, and the law as actually published in Israel's Official Gazette on July 22, 2026 is titled "Consumer Protection Law (Amendment No. 74), 5786-2026." This isn't unusual — a bill's eventual amendment number is only fixed at final publication, based on how many other amendments to the same law pass before it, so a pending bill can be cited under an earlier, since-superseded number right up until it's enacted. We cite the gazette's own number (74), but the discrepancy is worth knowing about since all three are still circulating in coverage.
- Does the recording duty apply to every sales call, or only above ₪750?
- Only to calls about a transaction listed in the law's Ninth Schedule — a defined set of sectors — where the total price is ₪750 or more, or can't be determined yet at the time of the call (which counts as meeting the threshold, not escaping it). Outside those listed sectors, or below ₪750 within them, the duty doesn't apply — except for banks, insurers, insurance agents and licensed financial-service providers, who are covered with no price floor at all when they call to market.
- What happens if a business can't produce the recording when a customer asks for it?
- In a civil dispute, the law shifts the evidentiary burden: the consumer's version of what was said on the call, or that the call happened at all, is treated as correct, unless a court lets the business rebut it by showing reasonable justification for not producing the recording or the call-date details. Separately, a business generally can't use its own recording as evidence without the court's permission, so recording isn't a one-sided shield against the consumer either.
- How much is the fine for violating Israel's call-recording law?
- ₪53,070 per violation for a corporation, or ₪29,490 for a non-corporate business — confirmed directly in the Consumer Protection Law's own consolidated text, where section 22ג(ב) lists the five violations the amendment's new section 16ד created (failing to record, disclose, retain, deliver, or charging improperly for a copy) under one administrative-sanction tier. That tier is a 2015 base of ₪45,000/₪25,000, indexed annually to ₪53,070/₪29,490 for 2026. News coverage of the amendment reported several other, incorrect figures (Ynet: ₪14,750/₪26,500; Mako: ₪7,000/₪22,500, with ₪50,000 for banks) — only Walla's and Hidabroot's reporting matched the statute.
- Does oToK help a business comply with this law?
- oToK's CRM logs every call against the right contact and deal on every plan, including Free, which helps a business see which conversations cross the ₪750 threshold and need to be tracked under the new retention and delivery rules. On Growth and up, the Extra Mobile telephony integration adds automatic call recording tied to that same contact timeline. Neither replaces a compliance review — the law's specific disclosure wording, retention clock and 10-business-day delivery process are a business's own responsibility to implement and verify with a lawyer before March 22, 2027.
