Add Custom Label

I don't know. I can add a custom label in each field of a new contact. It's at the very bottom of the list when looking at the labels.

Maybe you need to reset your phone (like rebooting your computer): Reset: Press and hold both the Sleep/Wake button and the Home button for at least ten seconds, until the Apple logo appears.

Same problem here. I've got 24 custom labels but on some newer contacts I don't have access to the custom labels AND even newer default labels, like "iPhone" aren't available. Some labels like radio and company main show up in the custom list thought I don't recall creating them.

It is happening because you are syncing contacts with another service (in my case, Outlook). Unfortunately, you can't add custom labels in Outlook. Rather annoying.

I've had the same issue. As soon as I synced email and contacts with exchange, I lost the ability to make custom labels. Extremely annoying. Who needs labels like: pager, assistant and car anymore! Apple says it's Microsoft and Microsoft says to have my IT department call them.

Creating contacts in your On My iPhone account will allow you to add custom labels; creating them in your Exchange account will not. I had the same problem until I realized that I had set the default account (under Mail, Contacts, Calendars in Seetings) to my Exchange account; I changed it to On My iPhone, and the issue went away. Of course, any contact created this way will no longer auto-sync with Exchange (unless you sync in some other way), but you will be able to use your custom labels.