Methodology & Data Sources

The list of area codes, their status, and overlay relationships come from NANPA (the North American Numbering Plan Administrator) – specifically the NPA database and the Central Office (CO) Code assignment records. Two codes are treated as an overlay pair when NANPA assigns them to the same geographic area, which is why overlaid regions require ten-digit dialing.

Population figures come from the U.S. Census Bureau Population Estimates Program, Vintage 2024 (table SUB-IP-EST2024-POP for incorporated places). We use one official vintage rather than older decennial counts, so the numbers reflect current population as closely as a single public release allows.

Every city figure comes from the same release. The Census Bureau re-estimates its whole series with each new vintage and warns against comparing numbers across vintages. A newer vintage exists, but the subcounty product that carries it covers incorporated places only: 16,229 of the 48,057 rows in our city tables – 33.8% – are census-designated places, 9,742 communities home to 37,262,790 people, and Puerto Rico – the entire city tables of 787 and 939 – is published separately altogether. Refreshing only the rows the product covers would mix two vintages in one table, so every city number stays on the release that covers them all.

Area codes are assigned to rate centers – telephone-routing zones – not to city limits. A single area code usually spans many rate centers, and a large metro can be split across several codes. So when we show a “primary city” for a code, it means the largest place in that code's service area, not that the code belongs only to that city.

One consequence matters for callers: an area code shows where a number was assigned, not where the caller physically is. Numbers move with people, port to VoIP, and are routinely spoofed. An area code is a strong hint about origin, never a proof of location.

Each area code page lists the counties its territory reaches, with the population living in the part of the county that the code covers.

We take the published boundary of each area code and count the Census 2020 population centers of every census tract that falls inside it. Tract populations add up to the county totals in the same Census release, so a county's share is measured against its own count, not an estimate from a different year. Counties are matched by FIPS code, so places that share a name – Fairfax County and Fairfax city in Virginia, Richmond County and Richmond city – stay separate.

Two limits are worth stating. The boundary polygons are the public 2015 edition from the NANP boundaries dataset; 84 codes went into service after it was published, and every one of them is an overlay, so we give each the territory of the codes it overlays. Where a boundary clips a county so thinly that the sliver is under half a percent of both the county and the code, we leave it out rather than list a row that rounds to nothing.

The population summary and county table count Census 2020 residents inside the code's boundary. The city table works differently: it lists each city's whole PEP 2024 population, including the part served by a neighboring code. A city that straddles a boundary is where the two bases diverge most.

The per-code prefix (NXX) tables and the carrier for each prefix are built from NANPA CO Code assignment records. We label a prefix as wireless, landline, or unknown by matching the operating company name against a maintained list of wireless carrier patterns; where a name is ambiguous, we leave it as unknown rather than guess.

The “reports” figures come from the FTC Do Not Call Reported Calls data. We aggregate complaints strictly at the area-code level of the calling number over a rolling recent window, and show the count, the share flagged as robocalls, and the most common complaint subjects.

Two caveats travel with these numbers. Caller ID is easy to spoof, so a complaint about a number showing a given code does not mean the caller was in that area. And the FTC does not verify the details of individual complaints. We never label a specific number or person a scammer; the data describes an area code, not an individual.

The dataset behind this site – the code-to-city mapping with its measured shares, the county coverage figures, the complaint roll-ups – is published under CC BY 4.0. That permits any reuse, commercial included, on one condition: attribution.

The licence covers the layer we added, not the raw material. The facts themselves are nobody's property; Census and NANPA publications are US government work in the public domain; the FTC complaint data carries its own terms on its dataset page. What the licence attaches to is the matching, the measurement, and the corrections – the work this page describes.

Attribution is a credit that names the site and points at the page you used:

getareacode.com/216/, retrieved August 8, 2026.

The exact format is yours; what the licence asks is that a reader can tell where the data came from.

For NANP codes outside the US (Canada and Caribbean territories) we use the national numbering authorities alongside NANPA records. Special-use codes – toll-free, N11 service codes, premium and non-geographic ranges – are described from NANPA's assignment records and FCC rules governing how each range may be used and billed.

The underlying dataset was last refreshed in August 2026. We re-pull the official sources on a regular schedule so the figures stay current, and each area-code page shows the source and date for its data. If you spot something wrong, please tell us through the contact form.