How to block an area code on an iPhone

MyTipsandTricks wrote:

You have to go to your settings page after making a contact ‘1-(area code to block) and saving it.

open the phone app and scroll down to ‘Blocked Contacts’ then scroll down to ‘Add New’. Add the name of your area code that you saved in contacts. Some people say that you can just put the area code in here but I did it the way I described.

go back to the contact and scroll down and you will see in green it says Unblock Caller’. It worked. Or I hope it did. I made a Blocked Caller 1 and a BC 2 for two different area codes.

Have you tested this? Does it work?

It does not work for me either. iPhone 12 mini running iOS 17.6.1. I am able to add a contact named "Political Spam", with a phone number +1(202), which is where most seem to be coming from. I can see that caller in my blocked list. Yet, I continue to receive spam messages from that area code. I can reply "Stop", but they come back with a new list name. I can hit "delete and report spam" but then they come back with a different number. No way out, it seems.

Great write up but it still doesn't work for me. I am wondering if this is a carrier issue or if perhaps we simply have a different concept of what "blocking" a call means. For me, blocking a call is having it not show up in my recent callers list. Sending it to voicemail and not "ringing" is not blocking in my opinion. I already have my iPhone set up to send any number not in my contacts to voicemail and not ring, so this solution here isn't doing anything different than that if that is what it is doing.

Yes it does work. Add the contact, then go to settings-phone-blocked contacts, and add it from there.

I have tried this on iPhone 15 pro max and saving the contact as :

+1 <Area code>

Worked for me:



thank you!! this did work...

You are correct. After a week I realized the app wasn't helping at all for area codes alone.

Seems like a good idea, but it doesn’t work. There is no “block this caller” at the bottom of the contact page when I tried to edit the contact. Has anybody found another way to block all calls from the 501 area code?

You have to go to your settings page after making a contact ‘1-(area code to block) and saving it.

open the phone app and scroll down to ‘Blocked Contacts’ then scroll down to ‘Add New’. Add the name of your area code that you saved in contacts. Some people say that you can just put the area code in here but I did it the way I described.

go back to the contact and scroll down and you will see in green it says Unblock Caller’. It worked. Or I hope it did. I made a Blocked Caller 1 and a BC 2 for two different area codes.

some third party apps I have tried (eg Number Shield), say, they can block an entire area code. But in reality they dont "block" it, they "silence" the call, which means they just redirect it to voicemail. Similar to when you set "Silence Unknown Callers". In addition the apps generally only allow a few million numbers to be "silenced". So to silence a entire area code counts as 10 million numbers.

10/11/2024 iPhone 13 Pro:

1. Created a new contact called "Blocked Calls from AZ Area Code". I used +1 (602) as the contact number.
2. Went to Settings > Phone > Apps > Blocked Contacts > Add New (scroll to the very bottom of the list)
3. Entered my contact "Blocked Calls from AZ" in the search bar or could select the contact I wanted to block from my contacts list.
4. It automatically added the contact to my blocked call list. (I have more than 35 blocked callers, so the mention of that by another frustrated Apple user as a possible limiting factor did not prevent me from adding more.)

I block 512 area code this way 512-###-####. The phone doesn’t ring but the call still shows in the call list and it goes to voicemail . Sorry after a lot of research this is the least expensive I could find

Perhaps this technique worked for older versions of iOS, but there is no longer a "Block" button in the contacts page.

Call the contact after creating it, cancel it and block it from your recent calls list.

Another vote for Number Shield. After reading the recommendations above, I ordered and installed it. Works great!