Area Code Lookup

(270) 555-0123. The number splits into area code 270, exchange 555 and line 0123. NANPA lists 270 for Kentucky, in service since 19 April 1999 when it split from 502, with the time zone “EC”: western Kentucky runs on Central time and part of it on Eastern, so a call at 9:00 a.m. Eastern is 8:00 a.m. in Paducah. The line itself is not real: NANPA reserves 555-0100 to 555-0199 for fiction.

1-800-FLOWERS. On a phone keypad F = 3, L = 5, O = 6, W = 9, E = 3, R = 7 and S = 7, so the number dials as 1-800-356-9377. 800 is a toll-free code, one of seven (800, 833, 844, 855, 866, 877, 888) that are not tied to any place.

The common mistake: treating 876 as a US code. 876 follows the same three-digit pattern and is dialled with a 1 like any US number, but NANPA lists it for Jamaica; it split from 809, which once covered most of the Caribbean, on 1 May 1997. A callback from the US is an international call, so check the country before returning a missed call.

AT&T and the Bell System drew up the North American Numbering Plan in 1947 so that operators, and later customers, could dial long distance directly. NANPA’s database still dates 86 codes, such as 212 for New York, 213 for Los Angeles and 416 for Toronto, to 1 January 1947. Codes covering a whole state or province had 0 as the middle digit (Maine’s 207), codes covering part of one had 1 (New York’s 212), and no exchange could have 0 or 1 there, which is how switches told an area code from a local number.

Growth used that scheme up. On 15 January 1995 the first “interchangeable” codes, with any middle digit, came into service: 334 in Alabama and 360 in Washington. The fax machines, pagers, second lines and mobile phones of the 1990s then brought dozens more, and in 1992 New York’s 917 had already become the first code laid on top of another area instead of splitting it. Early relief split a region in two and made half the people change their number; later relief mostly uses overlays, which add a code on top of the same area and require 10-digit dialing for every local call. Local 7-digit dialing ended in more places in 2021, when areas that used 988 as a local exchange switched to 10 digits ahead of the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, which started on 16 July 2022.

Today NANPA, run under contract to the FCC, administers the plan for the United States and its territories, Canada, Bermuda and 17 Caribbean countries and territories. It publishes each code’s status, its overlays and the code it was split from, and forecasts twice a year when each one will run out of exchanges.

This lookup reads NANPA’s area code database directly: all 454 geographic codes in service, 32 non-geographic ones (toll-free, premium, carrier and government), 7 codes announced but not yet in service, and the reason every unused code is held back. Cities come from NANPA’s official state maps and the Canadian Numbering Administrator’s maps, transcribed by hand, so they are the places those maps name, not every town in the area.

It also checks a full phone number against the numbering rules, turns keypad letters into digits, shows the local time in every time zone a code covers, and warns when a code belongs to another country. It cannot tell you who owns a number or which carrier serves it: numbers move between carriers and places, and that data is not public. Everything runs in your browser; nothing you type is sent anywhere.

Related tools: Time Zone Converter, IP Address Lookup, and Windows Error Code Lookup.