Area code 914

Area code 914 was one of the first area codes announced when the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) divided North America into a system of numbering plan areas (NPAs) to facilitate automated long-distance telephony. The code was assigned to a numbering plan area comprising Delaware, Dutchess, Nassau, Orange, Putnam, Rockland, Suffolk, Sullivan, Ulster, and Westchester counties, an area largely coextensive with the New York state portion of the New York metropolitan area, excluding New York City, which received area code 212. In 1951, Long Island (Nassau and Suffolk counties) received area code 516 in a split of 914.

This configuration remained for 49 years. By the end of the 1990s, the increasing demand for cell phones and Internet dial-up connections caused concerns for exhaustion of the numbering pool. In mitigation, numbering plan area 914 was reduced to Westchester County on June 5, 2000. The remainder was assigned the new area code 845. Area code 914 was retained by all cellphones in use in the plan area before the split.

Prior to October 2021, area code 914 had telephone numbers assigned for the central office code 988. In 2020, 988 was designated nationwide as a dialing code for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, which created a conflict for exchanges that permit seven-digit dialing. This area code was therefore scheduled to transition to ten-digit dialing by October 24, 2021. This required ten-digit dialing in the eastern portion of New York; Westchester had been the only jurisdiction in that part of the state that had not been overlaid.