Netherlands Country Code: How to Call +31 From Anywhere in the World

If someone has given you a Dutch phone number and you are staring at it from outside the country, the piece you need before anything else is the Netherlands country code: +31. Dial that, drop the leading zero from the national number, and you are through. Everything else in this guide, the city prefixes, the mobile format, the little trunk-zero trick, and the ways to avoid paying your carrier a punishing roaming fee, exists to make that first step reliable.

I write this as someone who places international calls for work almost every day, and I have watched colleagues burn through phone credit on calls to Amsterdam that should have cost a fraction of what they paid. The Dutch numbering plan is actually one of the friendlier ones in Europe once you see how it is laid out, so let's walk through it properly.

The quick answer

To call a Netherlands number from the United States, Canada, or anywhere else outside the country:

1. Dial your international exit code (011 from the US and Canada, or + on any mobile phone).
2. Dial the country code 31.
3. Dial the Dutch number without its leading 0.

So an Amsterdam landline that locally reads 020 123 4567 becomes +31 20 123 4567 when you dial it from abroad. A Dutch mobile that locally reads 06 1234 5678 becomes +31 6 1234 5678. That dropped zero is the single most common thing people get wrong, and it is the reason a perfectly valid number will suddenly refuse to connect.

Why +31?

Country codes are handed out by the International Telecommunication Union, which publishes the official list of E.164 country codes. Europe got codes in the 3x and 4x ranges, and the Netherlands landed on 31, sitting between Greece (30) and Belgium (32). The plan behind it has stayed remarkably stable: an area code of two or three digits (once the trunk 0 is removed), followed by a subscriber number of seven or six digits, so every ordinary Dutch landline or mobile has nine digits after the country code. The telecom market itself is overseen by the Autoriteit Consument en Markt (ACM), the Dutch competition and consumer authority.

Dutch area codes you will actually see

Most of the Netherlands' population lives in or near the Randstad, the ring of cities running from Amsterdam down through Utrecht to Rotterdam and The Hague, so these are the codes you encounter most often. The leading 0 is the national trunk prefix, used only when dialing inside the Netherlands. You drop it from abroad. The full Dutch numbering plan lists every regional code.

Smaller cities and towns use four-digit area codes (think 0318 for Ede or 0229 for Hoorn), and the subscriber number shrinks correspondingly so you always end up at nine digits after the trunk zero. If you ever see an ordinary Dutch landline or mobile number that does not add up to nine digits after the trunk zero, assume it is miswritten.

Dutch mobile numbers: the 06 prefix

Every regular mobile number in the Netherlands begins with 06 when written in national format. Because people can keep their number when they switch networks, the prefix does not tell you which carrier a number belongs to, but it does tell you instantly that you are looking at a mobile. From abroad, you dial +31 6 followed by the remaining eight digits.

Dutch mobile numbers are ten digits long in national form (the 06 plus eight more) and nine digits after the country code, so the full international version is +31 6 XXXX XXXX. If you receive a text from a Dutch friend and want to save their number, store it in E.164 format with the plus sign and country code so it works whether you are calling from New York, London, or Schiphol baggage claim.

The trunk-zero trick, explained once and for all

Here is the thing that trips people up. Dutch numbers inside the country are written with a leading 0: 020 for Amsterdam, 06 for mobile. That 0 is a signal to the Dutch network saying "I am about to dial a number outside my local area, route me nationally." When you call from outside the Netherlands, you are not on the Dutch network, you are on the global one, so the trunk 0 is meaningless. You drop it and prefix +31 instead.

Think of it as a translation. The two forms carry the same information: the national form 020 1234567 and the international form +31 20 1234567 point to the same phone. Dial the wrong one from the wrong place and the call fails, usually with a short beep or a recorded message in Dutch telling you the number is unreachable.

If you store numbers in your contacts, always save them in international +31 format. It works everywhere, including when you are inside the Netherlands.

Calling the Netherlands without wrecking your bill

The mechanics are easy. The pricing is where people get hurt.

If you are a traveler and you turn on international roaming with a US carrier, calls to a Dutch number can run a few dollars a minute. If you are at home dialing a Dutch number through your normal mobile plan without an international add-on, the per-minute rate is often just as steep. Skype, the old default for cheap calls to phones, shut down in May 2025, and the WhatsApp-style apps only work when both ends are on the same app and online.

This is the use case Phonecall.app was built for. You open it in your browser (no download, no SIM, no app store), you dial +31 and the Dutch number, and the call goes out over the internet to the recipient's regular phone. They answer on their landline or mobile the way they would any other call. The Netherlands is one of the few countries where the landline costs more than the mobile: the current rate is $0.55 per minute to Dutch mobiles and $0.74 per minute to Dutch landlines, both on the rates page. Billing is per second, so a 90-second call to a mobile costs $0.83, not a rounded-up two minutes. If the person you are calling has both a 06 number and a home line, the mobile is the cheaper one to dial. New accounts get 30 seconds of free call time on signup to try the audio quality before paying anything, and the service covers 218 countries at per-second pricing, with no subscription and no connection fee.

Three groups tend to lean on this hardest. First, Americans with family or friends in the Netherlands who want to call any number without asking the person to install something. Second, travelers already in Europe who need to reach a Dutch hotel, airline, or local business and would rather not switch SIMs or rack up roaming. Third, small business owners who deal with Dutch suppliers or customers and want predictable per-minute pricing instead of surprise statements at the end of the month.

Try a call to the Netherlands with 30 seconds free

Emergency numbers in the Netherlands

If you are physically in the Netherlands and need urgent help, dial 112. It is the single European emergency number and reaches police, fire, and ambulance, free of charge, from landlines and from mobiles with a working SIM. Operators generally speak English well, which is one of the practical gifts of traveling in the Netherlands.

For non-emergency police matters, where you need to report something that is not happening right now, the number is 0900-8844. This is a Dutch domestic service number designed for in-country callers, and like many 0900 numbers it may not connect from abroad. The Dutch police website lists the alternatives, including how to reach them from outside the Netherlands.

Time zones: when to actually call

The Netherlands uses Central European Time (CET, UTC+1) in winter and Central European Summer Time (CEST, UTC+2) from the last Sunday in March to the last Sunday in October. The country observes EU daylight saving, so the shift happens on the same dates as the rest of continental Europe.

In practice, this means the Netherlands is six hours ahead of New York most of the year (five hours for about three weeks in March and one week at the end of October, when the US and EU switch clocks on different dates). If you are on US Eastern time, calling someone in Amsterdam between 9 a.m. and noon your time will land during their mid-afternoon to early evening, which is usually welcome. Calling after 4 p.m. Eastern pushes into their late evening, which is fine for family but awkward for business. From the US West Coast, add three more hours of lag; mornings for you are already evenings for them.

The EU has periodically discussed abolishing daylight saving across the bloc, but as of October 2026 no change has taken effect, so plan around the twice-yearly shift.

Troubleshooting: when a Dutch number refuses to connect

Even with the right code, calls can fail. The usual suspects, in order of frequency:

You left the trunk zero in. The most common mistake. +31 020 1234567 is wrong; +31 20 1234567 is right. Delete that zero.

You dialed a national-format number from abroad. If you type 020 1234567 directly into your phone from the US, your carrier has no idea the Netherlands is involved. Always include +31 or your country's full international exit code plus 31.

The number is on a special range that does not accept international calls. Dutch 0800 toll-free numbers, 0900 premium numbers, and 14 municipal service numbers often reject calls from outside the Netherlands. If you are trying to reach a Dutch bank or utility and the 0800 line fails, look for an alternate international contact number on their website; many publish one specifically for overseas customers.

Your mobile carrier has blocked international dialing. Some prepaid US plans require you to opt in to international calling or to pre-load credit for it. Check your carrier's settings if calls to known-good +31 numbers fail silently.

The number has been reassigned or disconnected. Numbers that have been out of use for a while can be handed to a new subscriber, so a number you called successfully a year ago may now belong to someone else or be unassigned. A recorded Dutch message that mentions "niet in gebruik" means the number is out of service.

If you can hear a ringtone but nobody picks up, the connection is fine, the person just is not answering. If you hear nothing at all, the number is probably malformed.

Dialing Netherlands numbers from a few common starting points

From the United States or Canada: 011 31 (then the number without the trunk 0), or just +31 on any mobile.

From the United Kingdom: 00 31, or +31.

From Germany, France, Belgium, or anywhere else in the EU: 00 31, or +31. The 00 prefix is the European exit code and is interchangeable with the plus sign on mobile.

From Australia: 0011 31, or +31.

From inside the Netherlands: Just the national number with the leading 0. Dialing +31 from inside the Netherlands works too; most Dutch phones handle it transparently.

If you are using Phonecall.app in a browser, none of the exit codes matter: you type +31 followed by the number without its trunk zero, hit call, and the service handles routing. You see the per-minute rate before you place the call, and the per-second billing means you are not punished for short calls.

A few things that are not country codes

Travelers sometimes confuse the country code with other numbers they see on Dutch phones. The leading 06 is a mobile prefix, not a country code. The 00 you see on some older Dutch dialing instructions is the international exit code from inside the Netherlands, equivalent to 011 in North America, not the country code itself. And numbers that start with 00800 are international toll-free numbers that happen to be reachable from the Netherlands, not Dutch numbers.

The Netherlands shares the broader European dialing conventions with its neighbors, but each still has its own country code: Belgium is +32, Germany is +49, France is +33, the United Kingdom is +44, Luxembourg is +352, and Denmark is +45. The United States, by contrast, is +1, shared with Canada under the North American Numbering Plan. If you make calls across the region frequently, saving each contact in +XX format is the only sane approach.

Try it

If you have a Dutch number to dial right now, you can open Phonecall.app in any browser, create an account, and the first 30 seconds of call time are free so you can hear the quality for yourself. Rates are currently $0.55 per minute to Dutch mobiles and $0.74 to landlines, billed per second, and you can call any number in the Netherlands directly, no app on their end. A fifteen-minute catch-up with a friend's 06 number comes to $8.25. Compared to turning on international roaming or asking your home carrier to add Netherlands minutes, the savings add up quickly, especially for the kind of ten and fifteen minute calls that make up most real-world international calling. And if you are planning a trip rather than just a call, the official Holland tourism site is a good place to start.