Where are Zoom transcripts saved?

A transcript you saved from the in-meeting panel is a TXT file in ~/Documents/Zoom on your Mac. A transcript from a cloud recording is a VTT file in the Zoom web portal, under Recordings and Transcripts, and never touches your disk. A recording you made to your computer has no transcript at all, because Zoom does not transcribe local recordings. Most people searching this have hit the third case and are staring at a folder of MP4s wondering what they did wrong. Nothing. The transcript was never written.

The three places a Zoom transcript can end up

Zoom produces speech-to-text in three separate ways, and each one lands somewhere different with a different set of people able to open it. Working out which one you have is the whole job.

The last two rows are where the search traffic comes from. Both of them look like they should produce a file, and neither does.

Why older instructions send you to an empty folder

Zoom changed how captions and transcripts work in a rollout between May 24 and May 26, 2026, and most guides still on the first page of Google were written before it. The change split one feature into two. Captions became a live accessibility feature only: you can scroll back through the last three minutes during the call, and that is the end of them. Participants cannot retain, save or download captions as a post-meeting file any more.

What replaced them is a single consolidated setting called Meeting transcript, in the web portal under Meeting, then In Meeting (Advanced). It is off until somebody turns it on, and it does not start by itself: the host has to start transcription in the call, or an admin has to switch on Automatically generate transcripts for all meetings. If you followed a 2025 tutorial, enabled Save captions, and came back to an empty Zoom folder, that setting no longer exists to do what the tutorial promised.

The Meeting transcript setting needs a Pro, Business or Enterprise account. Cloud recording's audio transcript, which is the older and separate route, needs a Pro, Business, Education or Enterprise account with cloud recording switched on. There is no free plan route to a Zoom-made transcript that survives the call.

The exact paths and file names on a Mac

Zoom's default local folder is /Users/[Username]/Documents/Zoom, which is ~/Documents/Zoom in shorthand. Inside it, each recorded meeting gets its own subfolder named from the date and the meeting topic. Zoom converts a computer recording automatically once the meeting ends, so if you closed the lid mid-conversion, the folder can sit there looking wrong until you reopen Zoom and let it finish.

Read down the right-hand column and the answer falls out. Every transcript file Zoom writes comes from the cloud. Nothing in a computer recording is text except the chat log.

One detail worth knowing before you go hunting: the local folder is a setting, not a law. In the Zoom desktop app, Settings, then the Recording tab, the storage location field can point anywhere. On a managed Mac it sometimes does.

There is also a format switch that catches people out. The same transcript comes out as a TXT file when you click Save transcript during the meeting, and as a VTT file when the host downloads it from the portal afterward. VTT is a subtitle format, so it opens as plain text but is full of timestamps. Any text editor will read it.

Why a local recording has no transcript inside it

Zoom only transcribes audio it can process on its own servers. A computer recording is written straight to your disk and never uploaded, so there is nothing for Zoom to transcribe and no transcript is generated. This is deliberate, not a fault, and there is no setting that changes it.

That leaves you with an MP4 or an M4A and a job to do. You can upload it to a transcription service, which means the whole conversation goes to a third party. Or you can run speech-to-text on the file locally on your Mac. The three routes and their trade-offs are laid out in how to transcribe a Zoom meeting, including which ones work when you are not the host.

Who else can open your Zoom transcript

Any transcript in Zoom's cloud sits inside your organization's account, which means the answer is rarely just you. An account owner or admin with the recording management privilege can open every recording and transcript on the account through Account Management, then Recording and Transcript Management. That access does not depend on the host sharing anything.

The setting that surprises hosts most is Prevent hosts from accessing their cloud recordings. When it is on, the host cannot open the recording of their own meeting, and only admins with recording management privilege can. Your transcript exists, you made it, and you cannot read it.

Saving a copy at all is also somebody else's decision. Under the Meeting transcript setting there is an option called Allow saving of transcripts to computer by, with these choices:

• Host only
• Host and co-hosts
• Non-guest participants, meaning people inside the account
• Participants on specified IP ranges
• All participants

If you joined someone else's meeting as an external guest and the Save transcript button was missing, that is why. There is a matching control for whether participants can see the transcript panel during the call at all, and an admin can click the lock icon on the whole thing so no user in the account can change it. If the call you are chasing was on Teams rather than Zoom, the ownership model there works differently and has its own page: where Teams meeting transcripts are stored.

Two clocks decide how long it survives

A cloud transcript has a retention clock and a recovery clock, and people usually only find out about either after something has gone. The first clock is the admin setting Delete transcripts after a specified number of days. Cloud recordings have their own version of the same thing. Whatever number is in that box is the real lifespan of your transcript, and it varies wildly by organization: a university tenant might run 150 days, another account might run 30.

When the clock fires, the file moves to the Trash tab on the Recordings and Transcripts page rather than vanishing. You can typically recover it within 30 days of deletion, after which it is permanently deleted and cannot be recovered. Zoom emails a warning before the permanent delete on most accounts.

Here is the part almost nobody documents. That 30-day safety net is itself a setting, called Enable Trash for Recording and Transcript. If your admin has turned it off, the Trash tab is not there and a deletion is immediate and final. So the honest answer to "how long do I have" is: one number you cannot see, plus a grace period that may not exist.

A transcript that lands in a folder you own

Every complication above traces back to one decision. The transcript is made by your organization's meeting platform, so it lives under your organization's rules: their plan tier, their retention number, their admin console, their trash policy. That is a reasonable setup for corporate records, and a frustrating one when you just wanted the words from a call you were on.

The other option is to make the transcript yourself. Parameety is the menu-bar app I built for that. It captures your Mac's system output audio through ScreenCaptureKit, the sound already playing through your speakers, optionally mixed with your mic. When you stop, it transcribes on the machine with Parakeet and writes a Markdown file to ~/Documents/Parameety, named for the date and time. Then it discards the audio and keeps the text.

No account, no upload, no plan tier, no retention setting, and no admin who can read it or delete it. If you throw the file away it is gone for good, because there is no second copy anywhere. The honest limits: it records audio, not video, the transcript is verbatim with no speaker labels and no summary, no bot joins the call so telling the room is on you, and it needs Apple Silicon on macOS 15 or later. It is $15 once, not a subscription.

For the capture side of a Zoom call specifically, see recording a Zoom meeting on a Mac, and for the wider picture across every platform, the pillar is how to record meetings on a Mac. If your problem is the opposite one, that Zoom is transcribing when you would rather it did not, that is turning off Zoom transcription.

Why every default here is labeled a default

The paths, file names, settings names and the May 2026 caption change come from Zoom's own support documentation, because retention numbers and access controls are account settings I cannot see from outside. Every default here is stated as a default for that reason. Your admin may have changed any of them, and the web portal is the authority for your account. The last section is my own app, described with its limits attached.

FAQ

Where are Zoom transcripts saved?

It depends which of the three Zoom transcripts you mean. If you clicked Save transcript in the in-meeting Transcript panel, Zoom writes a TXT file to /Users/[Username]/Documents/Zoom on a Mac. If the meeting was recorded to the cloud with audio transcription on, the transcript is a VTT file sitting beside the recording on the Recordings and Transcripts page of the Zoom web portal, not on your Mac at all. If you only recorded to your computer, there is no transcript anywhere, because Zoom does not transcribe a local recording.

Why is my Zoom folder empty when I go looking for a transcript?

Three common reasons. The meeting was recorded to the cloud, so nothing was ever written to your disk. Or it was recorded to your computer, which produces an MP4 and an M4A but never a transcript file. Or you were relying on saved closed captions, which Zoom retired in the rollout between May 24 and May 26, 2026. Captions are now live only, with a three-minute scroll-back, and cannot be saved or downloaded. Also check the Recording tab in the desktop app: the storage location is a setting, and someone may have pointed it somewhere other than Documents/Zoom.

Can my company's Zoom admin read my meeting transcript?

Yes, if the transcript is in the cloud. An account owner or admin with the recording management privilege can open every recording and transcript on the account from Account Management, and there is a setting called Prevent hosts from accessing their cloud recordings that locks the host out while leaving admin access intact. Separately, an admin can lock the Meeting transcript setting so nobody in the account can change it. None of that reaches a file you produced on your own Mac outside Zoom.

How long does Zoom keep a transcript before deleting it?

Two clocks run, not one. The first is the retention setting, Delete transcripts after a specified number of days, which an admin sets and which most people never see. When it fires, the transcript moves to the Trash tab on the Recordings and Transcripts page, where it is typically recoverable for 30 days before permanent deletion. The catch is that an admin can turn the Trash tab off through the Enable Trash for Recording and Transcript setting, and when it is off there is no 30-day grace period at all.