Area Code 346 — Houston, Texas

NANP area code

346

UTC−6, UTC−5 during daylight saving

State
Texas
Primary city
Houston
Time zone
Central
In service
2014
Overlays
281, 621, 713, 832

The code reaches 68 communities and 12 counties across Texas.

Was this call legitimate?

The area code itself carries no risk signal. 346 is assigned to Houston, Texas, so a call from it is consistent with a real caller in that area — but the digits alone prove nothing, because they can be forged.

Caller ID is set by whoever places the call, not verified by the network. That is why neighbour spoofing works: an operation anywhere in the world can display a number that matches the area code — and often the first three digits after it — of the person being called, so the call looks local. Every community in the 346 territory is a plausible-looking origin for a forged 346 number, which is why one can be made to look like a neighbour to so many people. The same applies to its overlay codes 281, 621, 713 and 832, which serve the same ground.

If you did not recognise the call: let it go to voicemail — a legitimate caller with real business will leave one. Do not return the call using the number shown; look the organisation up independently and call the number you found. Never confirm personal details, card numbers, or one-time codes to someone who called you, however plausible the number looked.

Codes.zone publishes no complaint counts, risk scores, or caller identities. We hold no data on individual numbers and will not estimate what we cannot source.

Local time and when to call back

Time there now

Central · UTC−6, UTC−5 during daylight saving

Reasonable callback window

8:00 AM – 9:00 PM

local time in Central

Federal rules bar telemarketing calls to a residence outside 8:00 AM–9:00 PM in the called party's own time zone. It is a sensible bound for a personal callback too — and a caller who rang you well outside it was not observing it.

Overlay codes and ten-digit dialling

346 does not have its territory to itself. 281, 621, 713 and 832 cover the same ground, serving Houston and the rest of the 346 territory. An overlay is what a regulator adds when a region runs out of assignable numbers: rather than splitting the area and forcing half the residents to change their number, a second code is laid over the top and new numbers are issued from it.

The practical consequence: two neighbours on the same street can hold numbers in different area codes, so the code tells you nothing about which part of town a caller is in — and local calls must be dialled as all ten digits, because seven is no longer unambiguous.

Cities served

largest 20 by ZIP count
Communities served by area code 346, ranked by how many ZIP codes each holds.
CityZIP codesCounty
Houston178Harris County
Spring12Harris County
Conroe8Montgomery County
Pasadena8Harris County
Katy6Harris County
Sugar Land5Fort Bend County
Baytown4Chambers County
Humble4Harris County
Cypress3Harris County
Kingwood3Harris County
Magnolia3Montgomery County
Pearland3Brazoria County
Richmond3Fort Bend County
Alvin2Brazoria County
Angleton2Brazoria County
Bellaire2Harris County
Brenham2Washington County
Cleveland2Liberty County
Friendswood2Galveston County
La Porte2Harris County

48 further communities not listed. All Texas area codes →

Each point is a community served by 346, plotted from its record coordinates. The outline is the convex envelope of those points — a footprint, not a boundary.
  • Reference points and footprint
  • Not an official NANPA boundary
  • Not a USPS delivery area

Scope every community matched to 346. Source geoinfo-dataset (full_dataset) ZIP→NPA (2018 snapshot), GeoNames US postal codes (2026-07 postal dump) and Census 2024 county Gazetteer (2024 Gazetteer). Updated . Coordinates are place reference points, not boundaries.

Counties

Prefixes inside 346

We do not publish the NXX prefixes inside 346. The assignment of prefixes to rate centres comes from LERG routing data, which is proprietary, and we will not estimate it from postal data — ZIP codes and telephone prefixes do not map onto each other. Awaiting a clean-rights NPA-NXX source.

Why this code exists

346 sits in the middle of its complex. It was added in 2014 over 281 (1996), 713 (1947) and 832 (1999), and was later joined by 621 (2025) as the region kept running short of numbers.