
Area codes 561 and 728 are telephone
area code
A telephone numbering plan is a type of numbering scheme used in telecommunication to assign telephone numbers to subscriber telephones or other telephony endpoints. Telephone numbers are the addresses of participants in a telephone network, rea ...
s in the
North American Numbering Plan
The North American Numbering Plan (NANP) is an integrated telephone numbering plan for twenty-five regions in twenty countries, primarily in North America and the Caribbean. This group is historically known as World Zone 1, World Numbering Zone ...
(NANP) for
Palm Beach County
Palm Beach County is a county in the southeastern part of Florida, located in the Miami metropolitan area. It is Florida's third-most populous county after Miami-Dade County and Broward County and the 24th-most populous in the United States, wi ...
in the
U.S. state
In the United States, a state is a constituent political entity, of which there are 50. Bound together in a political union, each state holds governmental jurisdiction over a separate and defined geographic territory where it shares its so ...
of
Florida
Florida ( ; ) is a U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern region of the United States. It borders the Gulf of Mexico to the west, Alabama to the northwest, Georgia (U.S. state), Georgia to the north, the Atlantic ...
. 561 was created on May 13, 1996, in a split of
area code 407. The numbering plan area (NPA) comprises nearly every major city in the county, the largest of which being
West Palm Beach
West Palm Beach is a city in and the county seat of Palm Beach County, Florida, United States. It is located immediately to the west of the adjacent Palm Beach, Florida, Palm Beach, which is situated on a barrier island across the Lake Worth Lag ...
,
Boca Raton
Boca Raton ( ; ) is a city in Palm Beach County, Florida, United States. The population was 97,422 in the 2020 United States census, 2020 census and it ranked as the 23rd-largest city in Florida in 2022. Many people with a Boca Raton Address, ...
,
Wellington
Wellington is the capital city of New Zealand. It is located at the south-western tip of the North Island, between Cook Strait and the Remutaka Range. Wellington is the third-largest city in New Zealand (second largest in the North Island ...
,
Boynton Beach,
Jupiter
Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the List of Solar System objects by size, largest in the Solar System. It is a gas giant with a Jupiter mass, mass more than 2.5 times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined a ...
,
Delray Beach, and
Belle Glade. On March 10, 2023, area code 728 was added to the same numbering plan area to form an all-services distributed
overlay.
Within only five years of creation, NPA 561 was experiencing rapid exhaustion of central office codes from growth of service demands in the Palm Beaches/
Treasure Coast
The Treasure Coast is a region in the southeast of the U.S. state of Florida. It borders the Atlantic Ocean and comprises Indian River, Martin, and St. Lucie counties. The region, whose name refers to the Spanish Treasure Fleet that was lost ...
region and the proliferation of cell phones. In mitigation, the northern part of 561, the Treasure Coast, was split off with
area code 772 in 2002. This service configuration in the region was sufficient for twenty-one years until on January 4, 2022, the Florida Public Service Commission decided and approved an all-services overlay for the NPA, with an effective in-service date of March 10, 2023.
A permissive dialing period was not necessary for this overlay, because area code 561 already had a
ten-digit dialing
Ten-digit dialing is a telephone dialing procedure in the countries and territories of the North American Numbering Plan (NANP). It is the practice of including the area code of a telephone number when Dialling (telephony), dialing to initiate a t ...
requirement, because prior to October 2021, it had telephone numbers assigned for the
central office code 988. In 2020, ''988'' was designated nationwide as a dialing code for the
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
The Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in the United States, or Suicide Crisis Helpline in Canada, and formerly known as the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, is a suicide prevention and crisis help line to a network of a large number of crisis ce ...
, which created a conflict for exchanges that permit
seven-digit dialing. This area code transitioned to ten-digit dialing by October 24, 2021.
See also
*
List of Florida area codes
*
List of NANP area codes
The North American Numbering Plan (NANP) divides the territories of its members into geographic numbering plan areas (NPAs). Each NPA is identified by one or more numbering plan area codes (''NPA codes'', or ''area codes''), consisting of three dig ...
References
External links
Florida's Area Code History
{{DEFAULTSORT:Area Code 561
561
561
1996 establishments in Florida
Treasure Coast