Area Code 818 — Los Angeles, California

NANP area code

818

UTC−8, UTC−7 during daylight saving

State
California
Primary city
Los Angeles
Time zone
Pacific
In service
1984
Overlay
747

The code reaches 45 communities and 2 counties across California.

Was this call legitimate?

The area code itself carries no risk signal. 818 is assigned to Los Angeles, California, 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 818 territory is a plausible-looking origin for a forged 818 number, which is why one can be made to look like a neighbour to so many people. The same applies to its overlay code 747, which serves 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

Pacific · UTC−8, UTC−7 during daylight saving

Reasonable callback window

8:00 AM – 9:00 PM

local time in Pacific

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

818 does not have its territory to itself. 747 covers the same ground, serving Los Angeles and the rest of the 818 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 818, ranked by how many ZIP codes each holds.
CityZIP codesCounty
Los Angeles94Los Angeles County
Pasadena25Los Angeles County
Glendale14Los Angeles County
Burbank13Los Angeles County
Van Nuys13Los Angeles County
North Hollywood11Los Angeles County
Northridge6Los Angeles County
Arcadia4Los Angeles County
Canoga Park4Los Angeles County
Encino4Los Angeles County
Sherman Oaks4Los Angeles County
Woodland Hills4Los Angeles County
Malibu3Los Angeles County
Mission Hills3Los Angeles County
Pacoima3Los Angeles County
Thousand Oaks3Ventura County
Agoura Hills2Los Angeles County
Calabasas2Los Angeles County
Chatsworth2Los Angeles County
Granada Hills2Los Angeles County

25 further communities not listed. All California area codes →

Each point is a community served by 818, 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 818. 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 818

We do not publish the NXX prefixes inside 818. 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

818 has served this territory since 1984. It eventually ran short of exchanges to hand out, and rather than split the region and make half its residents change their number, the regulator laid 747 over the same ground in 2009. New lines here are issued from the newer code, which is why a neighbour’s number may not start with 818.