Telephone numbers in Mexico
Telephone numbers in Mexico are regulated by the Federal Telecommunications Institute, an independent government agency of Mexico. The agency published the Fundamental Technical Plan for Numbering (Spanish: Plan Técnico Fundamental de Numeración) on May 11, 2013. The plan establishes a uniform ten-digit telephone number format. It took effect on August 3, 2019.
01Telephone number format
All telephone numbers in Mexico have ten digits, of which the first identifies one of the eight principal geographic regions of the country.
| Prefix | Region |
|---|---|
| 2 | East |
| 3 | West |
| 4 | North |
| 5 | Center (Mexico City metropolitan area) |
| 6 | Northwest |
| 7 | South |
| 8 | Northeast |
| 9 | Southeast |
The national number is formed by prefixing the previously existing local number format with an area code. All ten digits must be dialed for all calls.
02Dialing prefixes
Since August 3, 2019, only the following dialing prefixes are available for use within Mexico:
| Prefix | Use | Format |
|---|---|---|
| 00 | International direct dialing | 00 + country code + local phone number |
03Dialing into Mexico
Destinations in Mexico are dialed from foreign location by dialing the foreign country's International access code (011 within the NANP area, 00 in many other countries), the country code 52, and the ten-digit national telephone number of the destination. As of 2020, the dialing procedure for mobile phones in Mexico no longer requires the inclusion of the number '1' after the country code. The procedure for calling landlines remains unchanged.
04History
Until August 3, 2019, telephone numbers in Mexico consisted of ten digits with either two-digit area codes (for Mexico City, Monterrey, and Guadalajara and their respective metropolitan areas) or three-digit area codes for the rest of the country. New area codes were assigned in the overlay format to address number exhaustion: in 2017, Toluca and Puebla and in 2018, León, Mexico City, and Tijuana.
In the early development of International Direct Distance Dialing (IDDD), Mexico elected to join World Zone 5, instead of joining the North American Numbering Plan (NANP). Since the 1960s, the Bell System had already established technical infrastructure to include Mexico in the NANP routing system, and continued to maintain special dialing arrangements using NANP area codes 903 (northwest Mexico) and 905 (Mexico City) from the US into Mexico, because of high community interest into the 1980s. Use of the area codes was formally discontinued on February 1, 1991, requiring callers to use international dialing.
Area codes
Major cities and metropolitan areas have the following codes:
05Dialing prefixes prior to 2019
| Prefix | Use | Format | Digits after prefix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 00 | International direct dialing | 00 + country code + area code + phone number | - |
| 01 | Domestic direct dialing | 01 + area code + phone number | 10 |
| 02 | Domestic operator dialing | 02 + area code + phone number | 10 |
| 09 | International operator dialing | 09 + country code + area code + phone number | - |
| 044 | Local cell phone from a land line | 044 + area code + phone number | 10 |
| - | Cell phone from a cell phone | area code + phone number | 10 |
| 045 | Domestic cell phone from a land line | 045 + area code + phone number | 10 |
| - | Domestic cell phone from a cell phone | area code + phone number | 10 |
06Other service numbers
| # | Services |
|---|---|
| 020 | Operator-assisted domestic collect call (Telmex) |
| 030 | Local time (Telmex) |
| 031 | Wake up service |
| 040 | Information / directory |
| 050 | Phone company hotline |
| 051 | Number portability PIN (can be used to determine your own line's phone number) |
| 070 | City hotline (not available in some cities) |
| 071 | CFE hotline (electric company) |
| 072 | [Reporte de Servicios de Ciudad] hotline (Water Troubles, Bad Road, Etc... not available in some cities) |
| 090 | Operator-assisted international collect call |
| 911 | Emergency telephone number (since 2016) |
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Telephone numbers in Mexico”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- MEX orthographic.svg by David Ayala, CC BY-SA 3.0
- Mexico Regional Indicators for Phone Numbers.png by XIC123, CC BY-SA 4.0
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