From Michigan and Iowa families with Dutch surnames to Americans newly settled in Amsterdam on work permits, calls to the Netherlands reach a country of tidy ten-digit numbers, 06 mobiles, free 0800 lines that do not work from abroad, and people who often prefer a WhatsApp message before an unknown call.
Your first call to the Netherlands is on us: $1.00 in free credit when you sign up, no card needed.
Rates updated October 31, 2026
To reach a Netherlands number from the United States, dial these three parts in order.
011 31 6 12345678
From any mobile, anywhere in the world, you can dial +31 6 12345678 instead. Press and hold 0 to type the +, and the phone picks the right access code for wherever you are.
Numbers in the Netherlands are written locally with a 0 in front, like 06 12345678. Calling from abroad you leave that 0 out, so it becomes +31 6 12345678.
Mobile numbers in the Netherlands are not all the same length (this example has 9 digits after +31), so a different count is not a mistake in itself. If a call does not connect, check the start of the number against the rule above.
Only the first part changes. Your access code replaces the 011, then 31 and the number stay exactly the same.
A ~ means wait for the second dial tone before dialing the rest. It is not a digit you press.
Your first call to the Netherlands is on us: every new account starts with $1.00 in free credit, no card needed. After that, calls to the Netherlands are $0.39 a minute, billed by the minute with no connection fee, no monthly plan, and no minimum spend. You top up prepaid credit from $5, and it never expires.
Only for the time you actually talk.
Top up once, use it whenever.
Any number, nothing to install.
The deepest US tie is ancestry. About 3 million Americans (3,011,733 in the 2024 American Community Survey) report Dutch roots - Census Reporter. Michigan alone has roughly 383,000, and the densest pockets are unmistakable: 26% of Ottawa County, Michigan (Holland and Zeeland), 14% of Kent County (Grand Rapids), 41% of Sioux County, Iowa (Orange City) and 19% of Marion County, Iowa (Pella) report Dutch ancestry - Census Reporter, and Sioux County's share is the highest of any US county - Census Reporter. These are the towns of Tulip Time festivals and Reformed churches - Dutch Americans.
Newer ties are growing fast. Through November 2025, 6,690 Americans applied for Dutch residence to work, study or join family, the highest number in at least a decade, and about 700 held permits under the Dutch-American Friendship Treaty by September 2025 - NOS. Each of those moves creates a new 06 number that family back in the US will be dialing.
There is a military thread too: U.S. Army Garrison Benelux runs a community in Brunssum in South Limburg, next to NATO's Joint Force Command Brunssum, plus a prepositioned-stock site at Eygelshoven - U.S. Army Garrison Benelux. Beyond the US, the same family networks run in reverse from Istanbul, Paramaribo, Casablanca and Willemstad, the home cities of the migrant communities described below.
From a Dutch landline or mobile, an international call starts with 00, which replaced the old 09 access code; on a mobile, + does the same job - Wikipedia. So the US is 00 1 plus ten digits. The busiest personal routes follow the country's migrant communities: on 1 January 2025, 16.8% of the 18 million residents were born abroad, led by people born in Turkey (234,449), Suriname (179,838), Morocco (177,329), the Dutch Caribbean (108,815) and Indonesia (98,655) - CBS. That means everyday traffic to +90, +597, +212, +599 and +62.
The quirk that surprises newcomers is the Kingdom itself: a call from Rotterdam to Bonaire, Sint Eustatius or Saba is an international call on +599, even though the islands are part of the Netherlands - Wikipedia. The islands also run five or six hours behind Amsterdam on Atlantic Standard Time - Wikipedia, so a call from the Randstad to Kralendijk after dinner lands in the middle of the island afternoon.
Dial the exit code: 011 from a US or Canadian phone, or + on a mobile or browser dialer.
Dial the Netherlands country code, 31.
Drop the leading 0 of the Dutch number: 06 12345678 becomes 6 12345678, and Amsterdam's 020 123 4567 becomes 20 123 4567.
Dial the remaining 9 digits, so the full call is 011 31 6 12345678, or +31 6 12345678 on a mobile.
If the number starts 0800, 0900 or 14, it will not connect from abroad: look up the organization's regular +31 number instead.
Drop the trunk 0 after +31. Every number that reaches a person is 9 digits after +31, whether it is an 06 mobile or a landline such as 020 or 0495 - Wikipedia; only 097 machine lines are longer, at 11 digits after +31. Do not dial 0800, 0900 or 14 + area code numbers from the US, because short and special numbers are not reachable from abroad - Gemeente Weert. And do not treat the Caribbean islands as Dutch numbers: Bonaire is +599 7, Curaçao +599 9, Aruba +297 and Sint Maarten +1 721 - Wikipedia.
Many Dutch numbers simply do not work from abroad. The municipal 14 + area code numbers (such as 14 020 for Amsterdam) connect callers to their municipality's central switchboard, but like other short numbers such as 0800 and 0900 lines they cannot be reached from outside the Netherlands - Gemeente Weert. The fix is to find the regular +31 number the organization publishes for callers abroad, as the section on city halls and the tax office below shows.
Unknown callers get a cold reception. The Fraudehelpdesk received more than 100,000 fraud reports in 2025, up over 60% on 2024, with losses of almost 69 million euros - Fraudehelpdesk. Phone fraud is a large part of it: nearly 10,000 reports of telephone scams in the first quarter of 2025, more than triple a year earlier, often from fake helpdesk staff hiding behind spoofed caller IDs - Security.NL. ACM tells consumers not to call back missed calls from unfamiliar foreign numbers - ACM ConsuWijzer, so a US number a relative does not recognize may simply ring out.
Sales calls need consent, so a stranger's call stands out. Telemarketing to consumers requires prior consent, and sales callers must show their number rather than call anonymously - Business.gov.nl. From 1 July 2026 the old exception for existing customers disappeared as well, so companies need explicit prior consent before making sales calls to consumers - Thuiswinkel.org. The practical fix for a family caller is the same as for fraud: send a WhatsApp or text first saying who you are and when you will ring.
Some numbers that look like phones do not reach people. 097 numbers are 12-digit machine-to-machine and data lines - Nummerplan, and 084 and 087 are personal-assistant numbers (virtual fax and voicemail services) used for services such as fax-to-email - ACM ConsuWijzer. If a number starts 097, you are holding the SIM of a device, not a phone that anyone answers.
Every Dutch number that reaches a person has 10 digits written locally, counting the trunk 0. Since the 1995 reorganization, geographic numbers are 9 digits plus that 0: big cities and regions use a two-digit area code with a seven-digit subscriber number, and smaller areas a three-digit code with six digits - Wikipedia. So 020 123 4567 is Amsterdam, 010 Rotterdam, 070 The Hague and 030 Utrecht, while 0495 is Weert and 0118 Middelburg. An area code is only a starting point: the reform let several towns share a code, and numbers can be ported between providers.
A mobile always starts 06 and also runs to 10 digits - ACM ConsuWijzer, so 06 12345678 becomes +31 6 12345678 internationally, and a landline written 020 123 4567 becomes +31 20 123 4567. Save both in +31 form and they work from any phone, anywhere. The one number you never put in +31 form is 112, the European alarm number for police, fire and ambulance - Rijksoverheid, which is for callers on the spot, not a line you can reach from the US.
The Dutch plan keeps a set of location-independent ranges that confuse outsiders. 088 is for companies and institutions, and a business keeps it when it moves - ACM ConsuWijzer. 085 is used for public communication services such as internet calling, while 091 is meant for newer services like video telephony - Rijksoverheid. In international format they follow the usual pattern: 088 123 4567 becomes +31 88 123 4567.
Other ranges are not for conversations at all. The numbering plan assigns 084 and 087 to personal-assistant services, 066 to paging and 097 to machine-to-machine and other data services, and it gives 097 numbers 12 digits - Nummerplan. That is why a 097 number is 11 digits after +31 while every person-to-person number is 9. 0800 numbers are free information lines, while 0900, 0906 and 0909 are premium service numbers - ACM ConsuWijzer.
The Kingdom of the Netherlands reaches the Caribbean, but its islands never used +31. Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba, which became Dutch special municipalities when the Netherlands Antilles were dissolved in 2010, kept the old Antilles code +599: local numbers start with 7 on Bonaire, 3 on Sint Eustatius and 4 on Saba, and every local number has seven digits - Wikipedia. Curaçao also uses +599 with 9 as its leading digit, Aruba left 599 for its own +297 in 1986, and Sint Maarten joined the North American plan as +1 721 on 30 September 2011.
This matters in both directions. A relative on Bonaire is an international call from Amsterdam just as much as from Atlanta, because calls between the European and Caribbean Netherlands are billed as international - Wikipedia. The islands keep a different clock as well: Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba stay on Atlantic Standard Time (UTC-4) all year - Wikipedia, the same as US Eastern in summer and one hour ahead of it in winter, while Amsterdam is six hours ahead of New York.
The Netherlands has three big mobile networks. KPN and Odido remain the mobile market leaders - ACM, with VodafoneZiggo the third. Odido is the name T-Mobile Netherlands and Tele2's mobile business have used since 5 September 2023, while the budget brands Ben and Simpel kept their names - Odido. If an older contact is saved as a T-Mobile number, nothing changes: the 06 number is the same, and because numbers can be ported between providers, a prefix never proved the network anyway.
What has changed is how people talk. 13.7 million people in the Netherlands use WhatsApp - ICT Magazine, and ACM's latest monitor shows traditional, non-internet mobile calling still declining after a peak during the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021 - ACM. A regular call to an 06 number still has one advantage: it rings the phone directly, with no app, no data connection and no saved contact needed on the other end, which can matter when the person you are calling is an older relative.
Dutch institutions tend to publish a short number for domestic callers and a separate number for the rest of the world. The City of Amsterdam is 14 020 inside the country, but from abroad you dial +31 20 624 1111, answered on weekdays between 08:00 and 18:00 with English available - City of Amsterdam. The tax office's BelastingTelefoon is 0800-0543 at home, while callers abroad use +31 555 385 385, an ordinary 055 number in the Apeldoorn area, Monday to Thursday from 8:00 to 20:00 and Friday from 8:00 to 17:00 - Rijksoverheid.
Dutch municipalities use a 14 + area code number that routes to their central switchboard, but like 0800 and 0900 numbers it does not work from abroad, so the municipality's website is where to find a full +31 alternative - Gemeente Weert. The same approach works for companies: when a contact page lists only an 0800 or 0900 line, look for a geographic number or an 088 company number on the same page, and dial it with +31 and without the leading 0.
Yes. The leading 0 is a domestic trunk prefix. Dial 011 31 (or +31) and then the number without it, so 06 12345678 becomes +31 6 12345678 and Amsterdam's 020 123 4567 becomes +31 20 123 4567 - Wikipedia. After +31 you should have exactly 9 digits for any number that belongs to a person.
A Dutch mobile always starts 06 and has 10 digits written locally, for example 06 12345678, which is 9 digits after +31 - ACM ConsuWijzer. A longer number starting 097 is a machine-to-machine or data line: the numbering plan gives 097 numbers 12 digits. Those belong to devices and data-only SIMs, not to people you can talk to.
Generally no. Dutch municipalities explain that 14 + area code numbers, like other short numbers such as 0800 and 0900, are not reachable from abroad - Gemeente Weert. Use the organization's regular number instead: Amsterdam lists +31 20 624 1111 for callers abroad - City of Amsterdam, and the tax office uses +31 555 385 385 in place of its 0800 line - Rijksoverheid.
No. Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba use +599 followed by 7, 3 or 4, Curaçao uses +599 9, Aruba has +297 and Sint Maarten is +1 721 in the North American plan - Wikipedia. Calls between the European and Caribbean Netherlands are international calls, and the islands keep Atlantic Standard Time, UTC-4, all year.
The Netherlands is normally 6 hours ahead of US Eastern and 9 ahead of Pacific. Europe changes clocks on the last Sundays of March and October, the US on the second Sunday of March and the first Sunday of November - NIST, so for two to three weeks in March and one week in late October the gap is 5 and 8 hours. In 2026 Dutch clocks go back on 25 October - Rijksoverheid.
Most likely caution. The Fraudehelpdesk logged more than 100,000 fraud reports in 2025 - Fraudehelpdesk, reports of phone scams, often by fake helpdesk staff, tripled in early 2025 - Security.NL, and ACM advises people not to call back unfamiliar foreign numbers - ACM ConsuWijzer. Send a WhatsApp or text first saying who you are and when you will call, then dial the full +31 number.
Your first call is on us. Sign up for $1.00 in free credit, no card needed, and dial any Netherlands number right from your browser.
Start calling