UK area codes

This is a list of telephone dialling codes in the United Kingdom. The national telephone numbering plan is maintained by Ofcom, an independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries. This list is based on the official standard, but includes defunct codes and historical changes, including the derivation of the two letter identities, in cases where known. The United Kingdom adopts an open telephone numbering plan for its public switched telephone network. Dialling codes do not correspond to specific political boundaries. For example, the Coventry dialling code covers a large area of Warwickshire and the Manchester dialling code covers part or all of several neighbouring towns. ELNS (Extended Linked Numbering Scheme) areas are where an area code is associated with more than one place name.

When dialling within the country, all area codes are preceded by the national trunk prefix 0, which has been included in all listings in this article. 0 was traditionally the number dialled for the operator for trunk calls before subscriber trunk dialling (STD) was introduced, and so was retained as a prefix for direct dialled calls. In the majority of areas, the area code still corresponds to the original STD letter code. When dialling from abroad, the 0 prefix is not dialled. When dialling within the same area, the area code is not needed, save for a handful of areas that do require this. When calling from a mobile telephone, the area code is always needed.

For an explanation of the two letter STD codes used below, see Introduction of area codes

01426, 01523 and other non-standard 01 prefixes were briefly used for pagers in the late 1990s and then moved to new 076 prefixes in the Big Number Change in 2000/2001.

The 01632 area code is set aside for use as fictional numbers for drama as are parts of a number of other area codes.

The length of the area code part and the local number part is found as follows:

The number format '2+8' refers to, e.g. London, numbers using the (020) xxxx xxxx format.

The number format '5+4' refers to, e.g. Brampton, numbers using the (0169 77) xxxx format.

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