Does someone know if you save their WhatsApp status?
No — and the reason why says something useful about how status saving actually works.
No. WhatsApp does not notify anyone when you save a status, and there is no setting that turns such a notification on.
The reason is structural rather than a policy choice, and it is worth understanding.
What WhatsApp does track
WhatsApp tells a poster who viewed their status. That happens on WhatsApp's servers: your phone reports the view, the sender's app shows your name in the list.
Viewing is a network event. WhatsApp is in the middle of it, so it can count it.
Why saving is invisible
When you view a status, WhatsApp downloads the file to your phone so it plays smoothly. Saving it means copying that file from one folder on your device to another.
No network request. WhatsApp's servers are not involved and have nothing to observe. A third-party app doing the copy is even further removed — it is reading a folder Android granted it access to.
There is simply no channel through which the sender could be told.
Screenshots are the same
The same applies to screenshotting a status. WhatsApp does not notify on screenshots of statuses, chats, or photos — unlike view-once media, where the app actively tries to block capture.
What this means in practice
It makes courtesy your responsibility rather than the app's. Nobody will stop you and nobody will tell them, so the question of whether to re-share something belongs to you.
Our view, for what it is worth: saving for yourself is ordinary. Reposting someone's photo or video as your own is the part worth asking about first — it belongs to whoever made it, and asking costs one message.
One thing that is visible
If you save a status and then post it yourself, that is obviously visible — you have published it. People do notice their own photos appearing on someone else's status, and that is the situation where "nobody can tell" stops being true.