From a grandmother in Tainan picking up a call from Arcadia, California, to a TSMC engineer in Phoenix checking in with colleagues in Hsinchu, calling Taiwan means dropping the leading 0, dialing +886 rather than +86, and remembering that nearly everyone on the island also lives on LINE.
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Rates updated October 31, 2026
To reach a Taiwan number from the United States, dial these three parts in order.
011 886 912 345 678
From any mobile, anywhere in the world, you can dial +886 912 345 678 instead. Press and hold 0 to type the +, and the phone picks the right access code for wherever you are.
Numbers in Taiwan are written locally with a 0 in front, like 0912 345 678. Calling from abroad you leave that 0 out, so it becomes +886 912 345 678.
A Taiwan mobile number is 9 digits after +886. If a call does not connect, count the digits first.
Only the first part changes. Your access code replaces the 011, then 886 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.
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Taiwan's US diaspora is larger than many people assume. The American Community Survey counted 400,369 Taiwan-born residents in 2024, including 181,042 in California, 36,033 in Texas, 31,461 in New York, 18,678 in Washington and 16,401 in New Jersey; the largest metro communities are Los Angeles (83,213), New York (42,025), San Jose (35,211), San Francisco-Oakland (32,365), Seattle (15,485) and Houston (15,091) - US Census Bureau. Those figures map onto familiar neighborhoods: the San Gabriel Valley suburbs of Arcadia, Diamond Bar, Walnut, Rowland Heights and Hacienda Heights, Flushing in Queens, Cupertino in Silicon Valley and Sugar Land outside Houston - Taiwanese Americans. The typical family call runs from one of those places to a parent's 02 Taipei or 06 Tainan landline, or to a 09 mobile.
Business traffic has grown with the chip and server trade. US imports of goods from Taiwan reached $201.4 billion in 2025, up from $116.3 billion in 2024, against US exports of $54.8 billion - US Census Bureau. TSMC Arizona employs more than 3,500 people in Phoenix and began high-volume production at its first fab in the fourth quarter of 2024 - TSMC, adding a Phoenix-to-Hsinchu corridor of engineers, suppliers and their families to the older Los Angeles and New York ones.
Taiwan has no single exit code. Callers choose an international carrier by prefix: 002 is the public international access code, 009 is Chunghwa Telecom's own prefix and 019 is its budget international service - Chunghwa Telecom, while 005, 006 and 007 route through other carriers - Wikipedia. A Taipei landline therefore calls New York as 002 1 or 009 1 plus the 10-digit number; on a mobile, +1 does the job. Calls to mainland China (+86) and Hong Kong (+852) are international calls as well. One domestic quirk visitors meet: from a Taiwanese mobile you must include the area code with its 0 even for a landline in the same city, such as 02 for Taipei.
Most personal calling out of Taiwan now runs on apps, above all LINE, which counts 22 million monthly active users in a population of 23.42 million - LY Corporation. Beyond family in the US and business across the Taiwan Strait, a major outbound corridor runs to Southeast Asia: Taiwan hosts more than 800,000 foreign workers, mostly from Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, who work in factories and as home caregivers and domestic workers far from their own families - US State Department.
From a US or Canadian landline, dial the exit code 011. On a mobile or in a browser dialer, type + instead.
Dial Taiwan's country code, 886 (not 86, which is mainland China).
Drop the leading 0 that Taiwanese numbers are written with: the mobile 0912 345 678 becomes 912 345 678, and the Taipei landline (02) 2345 6789 becomes 2 2345 6789.
Dial the rest: 011 886 912 345 678 for the mobile, or 011 886 2 2345 6789 for the Taipei landline.
The 0 at the start of every Taiwanese area code and mobile prefix is a domestic long-distance prefix and is omitted from abroad - Wikipedia. After +886, a mobile has 9 digits beginning with 9; Taipei, Taichung city and Nantou landlines also have 9, and other landlines 8. Dialing +886 followed by a 0 produces a malformed number that will not connect. Keep +886 and +86 apart, check the digit count, and expect 0800 freephone numbers to be unreliable from abroad. If your relative's landline plays a recorded scam warning before your call, that is a Taiwanese network feature, not a fault on your line.
Taiwan filters international calls aggressively. In May 2023 the National Communications Commission told carriers to filter calls from abroad that display Taiwanese numbers from +886 0 to +886 8, and in October 2023 mobile networks began blocking spoofed +886 9 mobile numbers as well. The effect was immediate: international calls fell from 41.83 million in July 2023 to 24.13 million in September, and the share of them showing a +886 number dropped from an average of 36.1% in the first half of 2023 to 7.14% - Taipei Times. The lesson for callers is simple. A call from the US must present a genuine foreign number; any service that disguises your caller ID as a Taiwanese number is exactly what these filters are built to stop.
Landlines play a warning before your voice. Since 15 September 2023, Taiwanese landline users hear a scam alert whenever they receive an international call, whatever the number - Taipei Times. The recording lasts 6.5 to 7 seconds, is spoken in Mandarin and Hoklo (Taiwanese), costs nothing and can be skipped by pressing any key, and people who regularly receive overseas calls can apply to have it switched off - Taipei Times. An elderly parent on a home line will hear that warning before hearing you, so tell them the call is coming. In 2026 carriers added a similar alert for calls from hidden numbers, trialed by Chunghwa Telecom from 2 March, with the mobile networks due to follow in May and landlines in June - Taipei Times. Keep your caller ID visible.
The leading 0 and the digit count trip up callers. Every Taiwanese number is written with its domestic 0 (02 for Taipei, 0912 for a mobile), and that 0 has to go when you dial from abroad. Landline lengths also vary: Taipei and Taichung city numbers carry 8 local digits while Kaohsiung, Tainan and Hsinchu carry 7, so a number that looks short is not necessarily wrong. And because Taiwan's code is one digit away from mainland China's +86, dropping an 8 by mistake sends the call to the wrong country altogether.
Taiwan uses an open numbering plan, so area codes and local numbers vary in length. Taipei, New Taipei and Keelung share 02 with 8-digit local numbers, and Taichung (04) also has 8; most other areas, including Kaohsiung (07), Tainan (06) and Hsinchu (03), have 7; smaller codes such as Miaoli (037), Taitung (089) and Kinmen (082) have 6 - Wikipedia. Taichung moved from 7 to 8 digits on 1 January 2001 - Chinese Wikipedia, so a 7-digit Taichung number in an old address book is out of date.
Inside Taiwan the 0 works as a long-distance prefix, and a call between areas counts as long distance even when both share a code: Hsinchu and Taoyuan both use 03, yet a call between them is long distance. From abroad the 0 disappears, so Taipei's (02) 2345 6789 becomes +886 2 2345 6789.
Two groups of numbers surprise people. Kinmen (082) and Matsu (0836), island counties just off China's Fujian coast, are on Taiwan's +886 plan rather than China's +86, and Matsu's local numbers have only 5 digits - Wikipedia. And 070 numbers are internet telephone (VoIP) lines that run to 11 digits as written locally - Chinese Wikipedia.
Taiwan had five mobile operators in mid-2023 - Taipei Times and three by the end of that year. Taiwan Mobile completed its merger with Taiwan Star (T Star) on 1 December 2023, giving it 10.28 million subscribers - Taiwan Mobile, and Far EasTone absorbed Asia Pacific Telecom on 15 December 2023, with existing APT SIM cards and plans remaining valid - Far Eastern Group. Chunghwa Telecom remains the largest: at the end of November 2024 it held 38.8% of Taiwan's 5G accounts, against 31.3% for Taiwan Mobile and 29.9% for Far EasTone - Taipei Times.
For a caller in the US, none of this changes how you dial. A relative whose number used to be on T Star or APT keeps the same 09 number, and you still dial +886 9 and the rest; the visible difference is the network name on their phone. If an old number has stopped working, ask whether the line was cancelled or replaced around the switch rather than assuming the digits are wrong.
LINE is Taiwan's default channel. Its 22 million monthly active users equal about 93% of the population, and LY Corporation describes it as a primary means of business communication as well as the way families and friends chat, with LINE chats and calls part of ordinary business dealings - LY Corporation. For a call from abroad, that makes a LINE message the natural first step: it tells the person who is calling, from which number and when, and they may prefer to talk on LINE anyway.
A regular phone call still wins in specific situations: an elderly relative with a basic handset or a landline, a hospital ward, a government office, a bank, or anyone with weak mobile data. Those are also the situations where the international-call warning and the fraud filters come into play, so the two tools work best together. Send a LINE message saying who you are and which number you will call from, then place the call at the time you agreed.
Taiwan's emergency numbers are 110 for police and 119 for fire and ambulance - Wikipedia, and the National Police Agency's 165 anti-fraud hotline has taken reports since 26 April 2004 - National Police Agency. These are short codes for phones inside Taiwan. From the US, reach a person or office on its full number instead.
Freephone numbers start 0800 or 0809, and the whole 080 range is reserved for receiver-pays service - Chinese Wikipedia. There is no guarantee that a freephone line accepts calls from abroad, so use the organization's ordinary landline, usually an 02 number for a Taipei head office. Two older number types have gone: Chunghwa Telecom's 0204 premium information service ended on 31 October 2023 - Chunghwa Telecom, and its 099 personal-number service, which let one number follow a person across phones, ended on 28 February 2026 - Chunghwa Telecom. Numbers in those ranges from old paperwork will not connect.
Yes. Taiwanese numbers are written with a leading 0 (02 for Taipei, 0912 for a mobile) that is only used inside Taiwan. From the US dial 011 886, then the number without that 0: (02) 2345 6789 becomes +886 2 2345 6789, and 0912 345 678 becomes +886 912 345 678 - Wikipedia. Leaving the 0 in produces a number that will not connect.
Taiwan is +886; +86 is the People's Republic of China. When the ITU assigned codes in the 1960s, its members recognized Beijing's delegates as China's representatives, so the mainland received 86 and Taiwan was given 886 unofficially in the early 1970s; the code was formally allocated in 2006 - Wikipedia. Dialing 86 for a Taiwanese number sends the call to the mainland.
Mobiles have 10 digits written locally (0912 345 678), so 9 digits after +886. Landlines vary because Taiwan uses an open plan: Taipei (02) and Taichung (04) have 8-digit local numbers, most other areas 7, and small island codes 5 or 6 - Wikipedia. Without the 0, a landline is 8 digits after the country code, or 9 for Taipei, Taichung city and Nantou.
Since 15 September 2023, Taiwanese landlines play a scam warning before every international call - Taipei Times. It lasts about 7 seconds, is spoken in Mandarin and Taiwanese, can be skipped by pressing any key, and people who often receive overseas calls can ask their carrier to switch it off - Taipei Times. Tell elderly relatives to expect it, and message them on LINE before you call.
Taiwan uses UTC+8 all year and has not observed daylight saving time since 1979 - Wikipedia. It is 12 hours ahead of New York and 15 ahead of Los Angeles during US daylight time, and 13 and 16 hours ahead from the first Sunday of November to the second Sunday of March - NIST. A 7am call from New York in July reaches Taipei at 7pm.
They dial an international prefix, then 1 and the 10-digit US number. 002 is the public access code, while 009 and 019 are Chunghwa Telecom's own international prefixes - Chunghwa Telecom; 005, 006 and 007 route through other carriers. On a mobile, +1 works on any network. Many families skip the phone network and use LINE instead, which reaches about 93% of Taiwan's population.
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