How to Call the US from Australia: Dial Code, Cost, Time Zones and 188 Numbers That Answer

From an Australian landline, dial 0011 1 and then the ten-digit US number. From a mobile, hold 0 until a + appears and dial +1 and the number. That's the whole dialling answer. Every page on this topic stops there.

The part they leave out is that most of the US numbers you'll actually want don't work that way. We keep a directory of organisation numbers our customers have reached, with the organisation that answered confirmed, and when you take its US entries, set aside the Canadian companies that happen to share the +1 code, and count what's left, you get 292 lines at 158 organisations, of which 221, or 76%, are toll-free: 1-800, 1-888, 1-877 and the rest. For airlines it's 25 of 27. A US toll-free number is free from inside the US. It was never designed to be dialled from an Australian SIM, so some connect and bill as an international call, and many don't connect at all.

So this guide does three things: it shows the dial format with examples, it explains the toll-free problem and the way round it, which costs 3 US cents a minute from a browser or an app, and it prints 188 of those numbers, grouped by what you're likely to need them for, alongside the time zones that decide whether anyone will pick up.

The short version

Three pieces every time: Australia's exit code (0011, or + on a mobile), the US country code (1), and the ten-digit number. Always ten. US numbers are a three-digit area code and seven more digits, with no leading zero to drop, which makes them easier than UK or European numbers. If a number is written as 1-212-555-0123, that leading 1 is the country code, so don't dial it twice.

Two things trip people up. The +1 code also covers Canada and most of the Caribbean, so a Toronto number and a Miami number look identical from Australia and dial the same way. And US mobiles have no special prefix of their own, so a number starting 917 could be a New York mobile or a New York landline and nothing in the digits will tell you which, which is one reason a flat rate for both matters. More on cost below.

The toll-free problem, in numbers

The US runs customer service on toll-free numbers. Nobody else does it to the same degree. The FCC's toll-free guide lists seven codes: 800, 888, 877, 866, 855, 844 and 833. A call to one of them is free from a US landline because the company pays for it and the number routes to an ordinary local line behind the scenes, an arrangement that works across the whole United States and stops, without any notice to the caller, at the border. Melbourne is past the border.

Here's how the US lines in our directory split, as of 20 September 2026:

Compare that with the Australian numbers in the same directory, where 21 of 57 lines (37%) are 13, 1300 or 1800 numbers, or with the UK, where it's 14 of 170 (8%), and the American habit stands out as the outlier it is. An Australian company usually prints a geographic number somewhere. An American airline almost never does: of the 27 airline lines reached, the only two geographic ones belong to Copa Airlines and the ticket agency Kiss and Fly. Every line our customers reached at United, Delta, American, Southwest, JetBlue and Alaska was toll-free.

What happens when you dial one from an Australian phone depends on your carrier's routing, and there's no published rule. AT&T's support page on calling from abroad, written for its own US customers, puts it plainly: "In many cases, calls to toll-free numbers (800, 888, etc.) won't complete when you travel outside the U.S. If they do, they're billed as international calls." An Australian SIM is outside the U.S. too. The number that costs nothing in Chicago is a gamble in Sydney.

The way round it is to place the call from the internet instead of the SIM, because a browser-based calling service treats +1 800 829 1040 as exactly what it is, a US number, and connects it the way it would connect any other. Same digits. Different road. CallTuv does this from any browser and from its iPhone and Android apps, and it bills a toll-free number at the ordinary US rate. We checked that rate on the public price lookup on 20 September 2026: +1 800 227 4500 (Qantas's US line), a Manhattan landline and a San Francisco mobile all came back at $0.03 a minute. Our guide to calling 1800 numbers online goes deeper on why the numbers fail and what to type.

What it costs

The Australian carriers bundle some international calling into their plans. Telstra's upfront plans, for instance, include 30 minutes a month of standard international calls, and past that you buy a monthly calling pack, which renews every month until you cancel it. That's a fair deal for a weekly chat with a cousin in Denver, and a poor fit for the calls this guide is about, which are the 40-minute hold with an airline, the bank fraud line at 3am and the government office that parks you in a queue, because any one of those eats a monthly allowance in a single sitting and the toll-free ones may not connect anyway. One hold. Gone.

Pay-per-minute is the other model. On CallTuv, as of 20 September 2026:

Prices are in US dollars. Calls are billed per whole minute, and since you need at least three minutes of credit at the destination rate to start a call, nine cents is enough to begin dialling a US number. Credit starts at $5, which is about 166 minutes to the US, and it doesn't expire, so you can top up once for a trip, use a dollar of it, and find the rest still there next year when the airline loses your bag again. No plan. Nothing to cancel. The rate is shown in the dialler before you press call, and the current figure is always on the US rates page.

Going the other way, from the US to Australia, costs $0.07 a minute to a landline and $0.16 to a mobile on the same card, and the same app handles it. Numbers are on the Australia rates page.

When to call: the time zones

This is where calling the US from Australia gets genuinely awkward, because American business hours fall in the middle of the Australian night and the gap moves twice a year, in opposite directions, as the two countries change their clocks. New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, the ACT and South Australia go on to daylight saving on the first Sunday of October (4 October 2026) and come off it on the first Sunday of April (4 April 2027); Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia stay put. The US does the reverse: off on 1 November 2026, back on 14 March 2027. The offsets below come from the IANA time zone database.

In practice, from Sydney right now, a 9 to 5 office in New York is open from 11pm to 7am your time, and one in Los Angeles from 2am to 10am. The usable window is early morning. Ring East Coast lines before 7am, West Coast lines between 7 and 10am. From November the whole thing shifts two hours later, so New York runs 1am to 9am Sydney time and Los Angeles 4am to noon, which is kinder to everyone except the person in Los Angeles. Perth has it easiest; a New York office is open until 5am Perth time now and until 6am in the southern summer.

The good news is that a large share of the numbers below don't keep office hours at all, because bank fraud lines, card activation lines, airline reservations and the big travel sites answer around the clock, and the ones that do keep hours are mostly government. Plan those. If you're calling the IRS, our IRS calling guide has the hours and the shortest-queue times.

Calling a US number from Australia, step by step

1. Get the number in international form. Whatever the company prints, turn it into +1 and ten digits. 1-800-433-7300 becomes +1 800 433 7300. (212) 555-0123 becomes +1 212 555 0123.
2. Pick your route. For a friend's mobile, your Australian SIM works: dial +1 and the number, and your plan's international minutes or rate apply. For anything toll-free, or anything that might run long, use a calling app.
3. Open the dialler. On a laptop, calltuv.com works in Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge with no download. On a phone, use the iPhone or Android app, or the browser; the same balance covers all of them.
4. Type the number with +1 and check the rate shown under it. For a US number it reads $0.03.
5. Call, and wait for it to connect before pressing anything. If you reach a phone menu, the keypad sends digits once the call is live, not before. Press one digit at a time. Our phone menu guide covers the case where the menu ignores you.
6. Have your details ready. A US bank or airline will ask for the card or booking number, your date of birth and often the phone number on the account. If that number is an Australian one, say so early; some systems try to text a code to it, and that's a separate problem covered below.

US numbers our customers have reached from abroad

Everything below comes from the directory described in the method section: numbers our customers connected to, with the organisation that answered confirmed, current as of 20 September 2026. We've printed 188 of the 292 US lines. What's left out is duplicates (Wells Fargo has eight unlabelled main lines and you get two of them), local branches, and a handful of small businesses nobody reading this will need. "Toll-free" means the number starts with one of the FCC's seven codes and is the kind that may not connect from a SIM. "Geographic" numbers dial from anything.

Where a company gave us both, the geographic number is the one to try from your Australian mobile if you'd rather not use an app, since it's an ordinary international call that any carrier will route. From a browser or the app, either type costs the same 3 cents.

Banks and card issuers

Airlines

US government

Payments and money transfer

Brokerages and retirement

US mobile carriers and internet

Travel, hotels and booking sites

Insurance

Retail, tech, credit bureaus and delivery

What an internet call from Australia can't do

Three limits, stated plainly so that the rest of this page can be trusted.

It can't receive. CallTuv is outbound only. If a US bank insists on texting a one-time code, it has to go to a phone number that can receive SMS, which means your Australian mobile. Some US systems will text an international number that's already on the account, and some won't. If yours won't, ask the agent to verify you another way. Details in can I receive calls or texts.

It can't call emergency numbers. Not 911, not 000, not 112. Those go through your phone's own dialler. See emergency calls are not supported.

It can't fix a bad connection. The call runs over Wi-Fi or mobile data, and a weak hotel Wi-Fi sounds like a weak hotel Wi-Fi whether you're calling Perth or Pittsburgh. On a phone, mobile data is usually steadier.

Where these numbers come from

CallTuv keeps a directory of organisation numbers that customers have connected to, with the organisation that answered confirmed and, where a line has one, the department it serves. Read on 20 September 2026, it held 842 numbers under 58 country codes. 322 of them carry a US country code. 30 of those belong to Canadian organisations that use +1 toll-free numbers (Air Canada, RBC, the Canada Revenue Agency and others), and we set them aside, leaving 292 US lines at 158 organisations. "Toll-free" means the number begins with 800, 888, 877, 866, 855, 844 or 833, the seven codes the FCC lists.

Three caveats. The directory shows which numbers people needed from abroad, not which numbers exist, so a company with one line in it isn't a company with one line. The Australian and UK comparison figures come from the same directory on the same basis (57 and 170 lines). And a number in this list was reachable when our customers reached it, which is not the same as reachable forever, because companies retire lines and reissue them, so if one fails, check the company's own site before assuming the route is the problem. Rates quoted are from the live rate card and the public price lookup on 20 September 2026 and can change; the dialler shows the current figure before every call.

Reuse is welcome with attribution and a link.

Frequently asked questions

What is the code to call the USA from Australia?
Dial 0011 (Australia's international access code), then 1 (the US country code), then the ten-digit US number. On a mobile you can replace 0011 with +, so a New York number reads +1 212 555 0123.

Do I drop any digits from a US number?
No. US numbers have no trunk prefix to remove. If a number is printed as 1-800-829-1040, the 1 is the country code, so from Australia it's 0011 1 800 829 1040 or +1 800 829 1040. Dial all ten digits after the 1.

Can I call a US 1-800 number from Australia?
From an Australian SIM, sometimes. Toll-free numbers were built for callers inside the US, and AT&T's own guidance says that from abroad "in many cases" they won't complete, and are billed as international calls when they do. From a browser or app-based calling service they connect normally; on CallTuv a US toll-free number costs $0.03 a minute, the same as any US number.

How much does it cost to call the US from Australia?
On a carrier plan, whatever your international allowance or rate is. On CallTuv it's $0.03 a minute to US landlines, mobiles and toll-free numbers alike, billed per whole minute, with credit from $5 that doesn't expire and no subscription.

What time is it in the US when it's morning in Sydney?
Right now Sydney is 14 hours ahead of New York and 17 ahead of Los Angeles, so 8am in Sydney is 6pm the previous day in New York and 3pm in Los Angeles. From November until mid March the gap widens to 16 and 19 hours. Perth is two to three hours closer to the US than Sydney is.

Is it cheaper to call a US landline or a US mobile?
The same. On CallTuv's rate card a US landline and a US mobile are both $0.03 a minute, unlike most destinations, where the mobile rate is higher. You often can't tell a US mobile from a landline by its digits anyway.

Can I use Wi-Fi calling from Australia to call the US?
Wi-Fi calling is a feature of your SIM: it carries your normal plan over Wi-Fi instead of the mobile network, so a call to the US is still an international call on your carrier's terms, not a free route. Our guide to Wi-Fi calling abroad explains what it does and doesn't cover.

Can someone in the US call me back on an Australian number?
Yes, on your Australian mobile, at their carrier's rate for calls to Australia. CallTuv can't receive calls, so give the agent your mobile number if a callback is offered.