If a Spanish friend texts you a number that starts with +34, you already have everything you need to call. That little prefix is Spain's country code, and getting it right is the difference between a connected call and a confused dial tone. The rest is just knowing where the digits break, which prefixes mean mobile, and how to avoid the kind of carrier bill that ruins the memory of a nice trip to Seville.
I've spent the last few years helping readers at DG Labs figure out the quiet logistics behind international calling, and Spain is one of the countries people ask about most. It's a top destination for US travelers, home to large diaspora communities, and a frequent business partner across the Atlantic. This guide walks through everything you actually need: how +34 works, how Spanish numbers are structured, what Phonecall charges to connect you, and what to do when a call will not go through.
What is Spain's country code?
Spain's country code is +34. You dial it before any Spanish number when you are calling from outside the country. The plus sign is shorthand for the international access code your network uses, so on most modern phones and web dialers you can simply type +34 and the local number. If you are on a desk phone in the United States that will not accept a plus, replace it with 011, so the full string becomes 011 34 followed by the number.
Spain's code is listed in the ITU's E.164 country code list, and it covers all of mainland Spain, the Balearic Islands, the Canary Islands, and the Spanish cities of Ceuta and Melilla on the North African coast. One code, one country, no surprises.
How Spanish phone numbers are structured
Spain uses a closed numbering plan. Every subscriber number in the country is nine digits long, and the leading digit tells you what kind of line it is. There is no national trunk prefix, which is the digit (usually 0) that some countries ask you to add when dialing within the country. In Spain you dial all nine digits no matter where you are standing. The Wikipedia overview of telephone numbers in Spain lays out the full plan, and numbering blocks are assigned to operators by the CNMC, Spain's markets and competition regulator.
That matters when you are calling from abroad. You do not strip a leading zero (there isn't one), and you do not add one. The format from the US is simply:
+34, then all nine digits: +34 XXX XX XX XX
So a Madrid landline that locals write as 91 234 56 78 becomes +34 91 234 56 78 when you dial it from New York or Chicago. A mobile that locals write as 612 34 56 78 becomes +34 612 34 56 78. The spacing is cosmetic; the dialer only cares about the digits.
Mobile prefixes
Spanish mobile numbers always begin with 6 or 7. If the first digit after +34 is a 6 or a 7, you are calling a cell phone. This matters because mobile and landline rates differ almost everywhere in the world, and in Spain the gap is wide.
Landline prefixes
Landlines begin with 9 (and in some cases 8). The first two or three digits identify a province or metropolitan area. Until 1998, callers inside Spain could dial just the local part of a number within their own province; since then, the province code has simply been part of every nine-digit landline number.
Province and city codes you'll actually use
If you are calling a business, a hotel, or a government office in Spain, the number almost always starts with 9. Here are the province codes most readers will recognize:
- Madrid: 91 (full landlines start +34 91 ...)
- Barcelona: 93
- Valencia: 96 (city numbers often appear as 963)
- Seville: 95 (city numbers often appear as 954)
- Málaga: 95 (city numbers often appear as 952)
- Zaragoza: 97 (city numbers often appear as 976)
- Bilbao: 94 (city numbers often appear as 944)
- Palma de Mallorca: 971
- Las Palmas (Canary Islands): 928
- Santa Cruz de Tenerife (Canary Islands): 922
- Granada: 958
- Alicante: 965 / 966
- A Coruña: 981
- Pamplona: 948
If an old business card or listing shows only the local digits, add the province code to make it nine digits, then put +34 in front. A Madrid card printed before 1998 that just reads 234 56 78 is +34 91 234 56 78 when you call it from abroad.
What a Phonecall call to Spain costs
This is the practical part. Carrier roaming and traditional international add-ons tend to charge somewhere between fifty cents and three dollars a minute for a call to Spain, often with a connection fee layered on top. On top of that, many US plans bill minutes used while in Spain even if you are the one calling home.
Phonecall is a browser-based international dialer, which means the call goes over the internet instead of your mobile carrier's international gateway. Current published rates for Spain, also listed on the rates page, are:
- Landlines (numbers starting with 9 or 8): $0.04 per minute
- Mobile numbers (numbers starting with 6 or 7): $0.36 per minute
That gap is real: a Spanish mobile costs several times more per minute than a landline, so if the person you are calling has both, the landline is the cheaper number to dial. Billing is per second, not per minute, so if the call lasts forty seconds you pay for forty seconds. There is no connection fee. Phonecall shows you the per-minute rate for the number you are about to dial before the call starts, so you always see what you are agreeing to.
For context, calling a Madrid landline at a US mobile plan's pay-as-you-go international rate often runs around $2 to $3 per minute. A ten-minute call that could cost twenty-five dollars on a legacy carrier plan comes to $0.40 through Phonecall. That is the savings-vs-carrier gap that keeps most readers coming back, and it is the reason I use Phonecall myself when I need to call a hotel on the Costa del Sol or a landlord in Valencia.
New accounts get 30 seconds of free call time on signup, which is enough to confirm audio quality on the actual Spanish number you plan to call before you buy credit. The dialer runs in Chrome, Safari, Edge, Firefox, or any other modern browser and reaches 218 countries, so you do not install anything or move a SIM card.
Try a call to Spain with 30 seconds free
How to dial Spain, step by step
Here is the sequence I give to friends who are calling Spain for the first time:
- Open the Phonecall dialer in your browser.
- Type
+34followed by the nine-digit Spanish number. Spaces are optional. Do not add a leading zero. - Check the rate the dialer shows before you call: $0.04/min for a landline, $0.36/min for a mobile.
- Click call. The call connects in a few seconds.
If you prefer to dial from a hard-wired desk phone that expects the US international prefix, replace the plus with 011. The full string from the US becomes 011 34 XXX XX XX XX. From elsewhere in Europe the prefix is 00, so 00 34 and then the nine digits.
Time zones: when to actually place the call
Mainland Spain and the Balearic Islands run on Central European Time (CET, UTC+1) in winter and Central European Summer Time (CEST, UTC+2) from late March to late October. The Canary Islands sit one hour behind the rest of Spain, on Western European Time (WET, UTC+0) in winter and Western European Summer Time (WEST, UTC+1) in summer.
From the US East Coast, that puts Madrid six hours ahead most of the year. The exception is the week between Europe's fall-back date (October 25 in 2026) and the US one (November 1), plus a couple of weeks in March, when the gap is five hours. If you want to reach a Spanish office during their working hours, calling between 3 a.m. and noon your time (Eastern) lands you between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. in Spain. From the West Coast, add three more hours of difference. The best window to catch someone awake and unbothered is usually before noon your time.
One more cultural note: Spain takes a long lunch. Many smaller businesses close between roughly 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. local time. If you are calling a shop or a clinic, aim for mid-morning or late afternoon Spanish time and you will have a much better hit rate.
Emergency numbers in Spain
If you are traveling in Spain, these are the numbers to know. They work from any phone inside Spain, free of charge. They cannot be dialed from abroad, so if you are trying to get help to someone in Spain from another country, call your own local emergency service or reach a person on the ground who can dial 112.
- 112 is the EU-wide emergency number. It connects you to police, fire, or ambulance and is answered in Spanish and English, among other languages. This is the one to remember.
- 091 reaches the Policía Nacional (national police).
- 092 reaches the Policía Local (local police).
- 062 reaches the Guardia Civil, who handle rural areas and highways.
- 080 is the fire service in many cities.
- 061 is the medical emergency line for ambulances in many regions.
If you only remember one, remember 112. It routes to whichever service you need.
Troubleshooting: when a call to Spain will not go through
Most failed calls to Spain come down to one of three things.
You dialed too few or too many digits. Spanish subscriber numbers are always nine digits long after the country code. If your call fails instantly, count the digits. Fewer than nine usually means the province code is missing from a landline; ten digits often means you added a leading zero that does not belong.
You stripped a zero that was not there, or added one that was not needed. Travelers coming from countries that use a national trunk prefix sometimes assume Spain works the same way. It does not. Dial every digit after +34.
The number is formatted with extra characters. A plus sign is fine. Spaces are fine. But if you paste a number with parentheses, dots, or a trailing extension like ext. 15, strip those first. The dialer only reads digits and the leading plus.
If the call connects but audio is choppy, check your internet connection first. A browser call needs only a modest amount of stable bandwidth; coffee-shop Wi-Fi usually handles it, but a crowded hotel network sometimes does not. Switching to a wired connection or a personal hotspot almost always clears it up.
Who tends to call Spain, and why Phonecall fits
Three groups of readers write to me about calling Spain the most.
The first is people with family in Spain. Spanish parents, grandparents, and in-laws who still prefer a voice call over a messaging app. For long weekly calls, the per-second billing matters because a sixty-minute landline call to Madrid comes to $2.40 total, versus a double-digit number on a traditional carrier add-on.
The second is US-based businesses with Spanish contacts: suppliers in Catalonia, hotel partners along the coast, lawyers handling property paperwork. Calling a Spanish office line at $0.04 a minute from a browser means a half-hour discovery call costs $1.20.
The third is travelers. Someone in Chicago can call their hotel in Granada to confirm a late check-in without paying their carrier's international surcharge. Someone already in Spain on a data-only eSIM can call a restaurant in Barcelona over Wi-Fi without burning roaming minutes. If the trip is still in the planning stage, the official tourism site Spain.info is the place to start.
Related country codes
If you call Spain regularly, you probably call its neighbors too. Phonecall supports the full set of codes you'd expect: France (+33) for cross-border family and work calls, Portugal (+351) for anyone with Iberian roots on both sides, Italy (+39) for European business routes, the United Kingdom (+44) for London-based colleagues, and Mexico (+52) for Spanish-speaking contacts across the Atlantic. Each has its own quirks of structure and dial format, and each gets its own guide.
Ready to call Spain
If you have a +34 number sitting in your contacts and you have been putting off the call because you dread the carrier bill, this is the easy part. Sign up, type the number, confirm the rate, and connect. Thirty seconds of free call time is enough to prove the audio is clean on the specific number you need. Everything after that is per-second billing at published rates, and nothing you install.