US Area Codes
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50 free US Area Codes trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Three digits can say a lot about where someone is from. Since the middle of the twentieth century, area codes have grown from a tool for long-distance operators into badges of local pride, printed on T-shirts, tattooed on arms and name-checked in songs and films. This quiz asks you to match well-known codes to the cities and states they serve, from the big-city originals to codes that cover an entire state. It also digs into how the numbering system was designed, why some codes were chosen as inside jokes, and which special numbers do jobs that ordinary codes cannot. It suits road-trippers, geography fans, telecom buffs and anyone who has ever glanced at an unfamiliar incoming call and wondered where it came from. Every question comes with its answer and a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Rapper Pitbull nicknamed himself Mr. 305 after the main area code of which city, where he was born and raised?
Miami
Miami's 305 is so bound up with Pitbull that the vodka company he took over in 2016 was rebranded Voli 305 in a nod to the nickname.
Q 02Area code 404, which shares its number with the web's page-not-found error, serves which Southern state capital?
Atlanta
Atlanta's 404 began in 1947 as the code for the whole of Georgia and is now an enclave, completely ringed by the suburban 770.
Q 03Which phone prefix, often paired with the exchange name KLondike, do American films and TV use for made-up numbers?
555
555 numbers are not all fake: only 555-0100 through 555-0199 is officially set aside for fiction, and the rest can be real or special-purpose lines.
Q 04Which state's area code 808, assigned two years before statehood, shares its number with a classic Roland drum machine?
Hawaii
Hawaii was given 808 in 1957, when it was still a territory. The Roland TR-808 drum machine followed in 1980 and was built for only three years.
Q 05Area code 321, requested by a space enthusiast to echo a launch countdown, serves the Space Coast of which state?
Florida
Florida got 321 after Robert Osband, a volunteer at the American Space Museum, petitioned for a code that matched the countdowns heard at Cape Canaveral.
Q 06The 2002 Eminem film 8 Mile repeatedly name-checks 313, the area code of which city?
Detroit
Detroit is where the story is set, and the code runs right through it: the hero and his friends name their crew after it, and a track on the star's 1996 debut album bears the number.
Q 07Which act's hit 867-5309/Jenny, from a 1981 album, set off a nationwide fad of prank calls to that number?
Tommy Tutone
Tommy Tutone reached number four on the Billboard Hot 100 with the song, and the calls never stopped: a college dorm room given the number in 1999 was promptly swamped.
Q 08The R&B group 702, first formed in 1993 as Sweeter than Sugar, were renamed after the area code of which hometown?
Las Vegas
Las Vegas supplied the name when Michael Bivins signed the group to his Biv 10 label. The code covered all of Nevada until 1998, when the rest of the state moved to 775.
Q 09Which area code was assigned to all five boroughs of New York City in 1947 and now belongs to Manhattan?
212
212 is considered prestigious by some Manhattan residents as the city's original code, and businesses value the air of long standing that an old number carries.
Q 10Which Seinfeld character changes phone numbers to escape fax calls and gets stuck with the new 646 area code?
Elaine
Elaine loses a prospective date who walks off on seeing the unfamiliar code. The episode, The Maid, aired in April 1998, more than a year before 646 actually went into service.
Q 11Area code 213, split five times between 1951 and 1998, was whittled down to just the downtown of which California city?
Los Angeles
Los Angeles shared 213 with all of southern California in 1947; each split pushed the code inward until only downtown and its closest neighborhoods were left.
Q 12Area code 312, once shared by a whole metropolitan area, now covers little more than the Loop of which city?
Chicago
Chicago kept 312 for its downtown core in 1996, when the rest of the city was moved to 773, a code that now completely surrounds it.
Q 13Area code 415, one of three California originals in 1947, serves which city and its northern suburbs in Marin County?
San Francisco
Q 21Which telephone giant, parent of the Bell System, published the first nationwide area code plan in October 1947?
AT&T
AT&T drew up the plan so that operators could route long-distance calls by machine, and it went on running the numbering system until the Bell System was broken up.
Q 22Which country shares the calling code 1 with the United States and has used the same area code system since 1947?
Canada
Canada received nine of the original 86 codes, and the shared plan later grew to take in Bermuda and seventeen Caribbean nations.
Q 23Which toll-free area code, launched for interstate calls in 1967, was the first of its kind?
800
800 worked alone for about three decades, until its numbers ran short and sibling codes had to be added: 888 in 1996 and 877 two years later.
San Francisco's 415 once stretched across central California; the future Silicon Valley was carved out of it as 408 in 1959.
Q 14Area code 713, one of four Texas originals in 1947, is the oldest of the codes serving which city?
Houston
Houston's 713 shrank to the immediate metro area in 1983 and lost most suburbs to 281 in 1996, but the line between the two codes was erased in 1999.
Q 15Area code 617 serves which New England city along with neighbors such as Cambridge, Brookline and Quincy?
Boston
Boston's 617 covered the whole eastern part of its state until 1988, and since 1997 it has been almost completely surrounded by the newer 781.
Q 16Area code 215, an original from 1947, serves parts of Bucks and Montgomery counties and which Pennsylvania city?
Philadelphia
Philadelphia was one of four Pennsylvania areas given a code in 1947, when 215 reached well beyond the city to take in the whole Lehigh Valley.
Q 17Area code 206 covered a whole Pacific Northwest state in 1947 but now serves mainly which city?
Seattle
Seattle and its innermost suburbs are all that remain of the original 206, which was whittled down over the decades as the rest of the state took new codes.
Q 18Area code 504, which gave up Baton Rouge to a new code in 1998, serves which Louisiana city?
New Orleans
New Orleans has had 504 since 1947, when the code covered all of Louisiana; most of the land west of the Mississippi was reassigned in 1957.
Q 19Which area code covers Alaska, the largest numbering area by land in the United States?
907
907 arrived in the 1950s, around the time the first commercial undersea phone cable reached the territory. One southeastern town, Hyder, uses British Columbia numbers instead.
Q 20Which area code, one of the 1947 originals, covers Washington, D.C. and no other territory?
202
202 served the District of Columbia on its own for more than seventy years, until a second code, 771, was added in 2021 to head off a number shortage.
Q 24Which three-digit number went live across the United States in July 2022 as the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline?
988
988 spared callers from having to remember the ten-digit hotline number in use since 2005; the FCC had recommended the short code in 2019.
Q 25Which area code was introduced across New York City in 1992, at first specifically for cellphones and pagers?
917
917 was the first code in the numbering plan to share ground with existing codes rather than take territory from them; regulators later banned service-specific codes but let it stand.
Q 26What do phone planners call a new area code added to an existing code's territory, the only relief method since 2007?
Overlay
Overlay codes spare existing customers from changing their numbers, which is why they replaced the older practice of dividing a region in two.
Q 27The first customer-dialed long-distance call using an area code was placed in 1951 from Englewood in which state?
New Jersey
New Jersey also holds the lowest-numbered of the original codes, 201. Englewood's mayor made the call, ringing his counterpart in Alameda, California.
Q 28The first 911 call in the United States was placed in 1968 in the small town of Haleyville in which state?
Alabama
Alabama got there first because a small independent phone company set out to beat the Bell System, whose own first installation opened in Indiana two weeks later.
Q 29In every area code assigned before 1995, the middle digit was always one of which two numbers?
0 or 1
0 or 1 originally carried a meaning of its own: a 0 marked a state or province covered by a single code, while a 1 went to those divided into several.
Q 30Which rapper released the 2001 single Area Codes, a collaboration with the singer Nate Dogg?
Ludacris
Ludacris first placed the track on the Rush Hour 2 soundtrack, then made it the lead single from his third album, Word of Mouf.