UK number ranges: which ones are safe to message, call, or verify a customer with

Read UK number ranges

UK number ranges tell you what a number was designed to do. A string of eleven digits starting with 07 passes almost every regular expression written for British contact data, and that's precisely the problem. Formatting confirms a possible category.

So the decision about UK number ranges has two steps. First, match the range to the channel you intend to use, because a voice-only number will never accept an SMS no matter how clean the record looks. Second, check the current line type and status of that specific number, since allocation data describes a block and not a subscriber.

Get the order wrong, and you pay twice: once for the failed send, and again in the support queue when a customer says the code never arrived.

Ofcom numbering plan

The authoritative reference for the Ofcom numbering plan is the National Telephone Numbering Plan, which sets out which ranges Ofcom has designated for which service and what restrictions apply to each. It's the document that tells you 070 is a Personal Number, and 056 is a Location Independent Electronic Communications Service.

What matters operationally is a smaller set of categories: real mobiles and things that resemble mobiles but aren't. Ofcom also publishes downloadable allocation files by range, which is where the range-holder detail sits if you need it.

The Ofcom numbering plan gives you the map.

Prefixes have limits

A recognisable prefix proves a number was issued for a given purpose. It proves nothing about whether that number is still switched on or who holds it now. Number portability breaks the link between prefix and network entirely, so the block a number sits in tells you the original allocation and nothing about where it lives today.

Pricing is equally unreliable from the prefix alone. Since 1 July 2015, calls to service numbers have been split into an access charge set by the caller's own provider and a service charge set by the organisation being called, and the access charge component ranges from 8p to 67p per minute. This depends on who the caller is with. Two people ringing the same 0871 pay different amounts.

Treat the prefix in UK number ranges as a routing hint. Everything after that needs a lookup.

Genuine mobile ranges

Ofcom designates number ranges 071 to 075 and 077 to 079 as Mobile Services numbers, and they're the only 07 ranges you treat as handsets. Everything else beginning with 07 needs a second look before it goes anywhere near an OTP queue.

That's the whole 07 story in one sentence, and it's worth holding onto because most contact-data problems in the UK come from teams that never learned the exception list. The exceptions are small in volume and expensive in consequence.

Standard UK mobiles

A number in 071 to 075 or 077 to 079 can move through a mobile workflow after normalisation and a status check. Ofcom's own market rules define a UK mobile number as one starting with 071, 072, 073, 074, 075, 077, 078 or 079, which is a useful list to hard-code.

The status check still matters. A number in a mobile block can be disconnected, ceased, or handed back, and none of that shows up in the digits. What you want before a send is a point-in-time answer to two questions:

• Is this line type actually mobile rather than a look-alike?

• Is the number currently registered and reachable on a network?

Portability adds a third wrinkle. A number first allocated to EE in 2014 sits on Vodafone today, so if your routing or your fraud model depends on carrier, read it from a live lookup.

The 07624 exception

07624 is the one place where a 076 number is a genuine handset. The range was set aside for Isle of Man mobiles during the Big Number Change, when the old 04624 mobile code became 07624 to match the 01624 used for Manx landlines. It's a mobile range within UK number ranges, not a pager range, and the Ofcom numbering plan carves it out explicitly from the radiopaging designation.

Jurisdiction is the reason to flag it. Manx Telecom explains that Isle of Man mobile numbers are prefixed 07624 followed by six digits, with the operator identifiable from that six-digit block. The Isle of Man is a Crown Dependency with its own communications regulator, the Communications and Utilities Regulatory Authority, which sits outside Ofcom's remit for most telecoms matters.

For messaging, that means routing and termination arrangements differ from a mainland mobile even though the number looks identical in your database. If your cost model or your delivery reporting treats all +447 traffic as one bucket, 07624 is where it quietly stops being true.

Mobile-looking problem ranges

Three UK number ranges among Ofcom number ranges pass a format check and fail the operational one. Each has a different failure mode, and each shows up in customer databases for a different reason, because someone typed a number from a classified ad or a legacy record into a field labelled "mobile".

A verification flow that accepts a non-mobile number and then waits for a code that can never arrive creates an abandoned signup and a support contact.

070 personal numbers

Numbers starting 070 in Ofcom number ranges are Personal Numbers: call-forwarding services that route to whatever line the subscriber has nominated, which is a mobile, a landline, or an international destination. They're not handsets, and nothing about the designation implies SMS or OTP support.

They also carry a documented fraud history. A report from the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau to Ofcom covering January 2011 to July 2013 recorded 4,596 offences referencing 070 or 076 numbers with reported losses of £17.1 million, and 96.1% of those related to 070. Ofcom capped the wholesale termination rate for 070 at the mobile rate from 1 October 2019, which cut the economics of the scam considerably, though the range remains a redirect service rather than a phone.

The consumer confusion behind all this is well evidenced. Ofcom research found that of the 34% of people who claimed to recognise 070 numbers, 48% thought they were mobiles and only 8% identified them correctly as personal numbers. Your customers make that mistake when they fill in your forms.

076 pager numbers

Outside 07624, the 076 range is radiopaging, and radiopaging in the UK has largely gone. Vodafone closed its paging network from 30 November 2017 after the Competition and Markets Authority referred the proposed transfer of the business to PageOne for a phase 2 investigation. At the time of the announcement the unit had about 1,000 customers, which tells you how thin the market had become.

A 076 record in a modern customer file is almost certainly dead, mistyped, or a legacy entry nobody has audited since the number was captured. Treat it as a data-quality flag.

056 VoIP numbers

The 056 range in UK number ranges is designated for Location Independent Electronic Communications Services, which is Ofcom's formal way of describing a voice service where the customer's equipment isn't tied to a fixed network termination point and which isn't a mobile service. Providers hand them out with VoIP accounts, sometimes for free, and the restriction on revenue sharing in the numbering plan means they're not a premium-rate risk.

Messaging support is where they get awkward. Some VoIP providers offer SMS on some number types and others don't, so an 056 number in your database has no predictable behaviour. Line-type lookup is the only way to resolve it before you commit a code to it.

Voice-only number ranges

Geographic numbers on 01 and 02, along with non-geographic 03 numbers, are voice destinations among UK number ranges and Ofcom number ranges. Treating them as SMS destinations produces silent failures. If your CRM has a single "phone" field, this is where mixed data does the most damage.

Within 03, the distinction that matters for assessing misrepresentation is between 030 and 033. Ofcom reserves the 030x ranges for public sector bodies and not-for-profit organisations, and providers verify eligibility before issuing one. Simwood's support documentation states plainly that 0300 and 0303 are reserved for public sector bodies and not-for-profit bodies such as registered charities, while 0330 and 0333 are available for general allocation.

That asymmetry is useful. A commercial entity presenting an 0300 number is worth a question, because a provider checks a charity registration or public body status before allocating it. An 0330 tells you nothing except that someone bought a non-geographic number, which any business can do.

Ranges to review

Some Ofcom number ranges among UK number ranges are poor fits for a customer contact list because of what they are, not because of whether they work. Numbers on 084, 087, 09 and 118 are service numbers, which means the caller pays a service charge on top of an access charge. Ofcom caps the service charge at 7p per minute for 084 and 13p per minute for 087, while 09 service charges run to £3.60 per minute or £6 per call.

Directory enquiries sit in the same bracket and carry the sharpest history. Before regulation, some providers charged almost £20 for an average 90-second call, and Ofcom capped 118 service charges at £3.65 per 90 seconds from 1 April 2019. Jane Rumble, Ofcom's Director of Consumer Policy, said at the time: "Directory enquiry prices have risen in recent years, and callers are paying much more than they expect."

Here's why these entries matter beyond cost:

• A service number in a customer record means the record was scraped or purchased.

• Ringing one back exposes your business to a charge set by whoever holds the number, which is the mechanism behind callback fraud.

Migration ranges need review too. The 034 range exists for numbers migrating from matching 084 numbers, and 037 for numbers migrating from matching 087, which means an 0345 or 0370 record has a commercial service line behind it and a corresponding 08 number somewhere in the same organisation's history. That's a support line in a customer field.

Freephone needs context

Numbers on 0800 and 0808 are free for the caller and have been free from mobiles as well as landlines since 1 July 2015, when Ofcom's UK Calling reforms shifted the mobile call cost onto the number's owner. Before that change, calls to freephone numbers from mobiles cost between 14p and 40p per minute, which is why so many people still hesitate before dialling one.

They're inbound voice lines belonging to organisations, and if one appears in a customer record, someone has captured a company's support number. That happens during data migrations and form autofill.

The right treatment is to quarantine. An 0808 in a mobile column is a signal that the surrounding record deserves inspection, because whatever process produced it probably produced others.

Range checks prove little

Every check described so far tells you about a number. None of them tells you about a caller. Calling Line Identification can be spoofed, and Ofcom has spent years tightening the rules precisely because it can. In 2024, the regulator strengthened its CLI Guidance to expect providers to identify and block calls from abroad using a UK number as a Presentation Number, except in limited legitimate use cases, and later extended that approach to +447 mobile Presentation Numbers.

The scale explains the urgency. Juniper Research counted over 129 million fraudulent robocalls received by UK subscribers in 2024, and providers were given until 29 January 2025 to implement the presentation number blocking measures. Ofcom's own consultation noted that around 20% of people answer a withheld call, which is why anonymising spoofed traffic was an incomplete fix.

So position range and prefix checks where they belong. They're a first-pass filter that removes numbers which can't work for your channel. They are not evidence of who is on the other end of a call.

Check before contact

Acudo checks line type and current status before you send an SMS or dispatch a one-time passcode, which catches the dead numbers and the non-mobile look-alikes. The results are point-in-time network signals, and Acudo's screening also covers the TPS and CTPS registers so marketing calls stay on the right side of the preference rules. If you're cleaning a contact file or building a verification flow around UK number ranges, talk to Acudo about where the check belongs in your workflow.