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Public-images-osm logo.svg phone
A telephone number associated with the object. Edit or translate this description.
Group: Annotations
Used on these elements
Status: in use




Sometimes it is useful to associate a phone number with an object, especially for business, leisure or amenities. A shop, a museum or a pub for example. The object can be on a node or an area. Clearly phone is always an additional descriptive tag to be added alongside other more important tags which denote what the object actually is.




fax=number may be used in the same way.





Some mappers started to add emergency numbers to police stations, hospitals and fire stations. This is fine as long as local numbers are used and the number is really bound to the object. You should not map objects with universal emergency numbers (e.g. 911 / 110 / 112) for local objects since this could result in non emergency calls blocking real emergency calls when people try to reach a local police station, hospital or fire station with non emergency matters.

In NANPA countries such as the United States and Canada, businesses commonly use phonewords in posted phone numbers. phone=* should contain the numeric, fully resolved phone number for machine readability. Phonewords seen on signage etc. can go in phone:mnemonic=*, which could help search engines display the phone number more memorably. For example, "710-555-BEEF" would be tagged phone=+1-710-555-2333 phone:mnemonic=+1-710-555-BEEF and "55-KLICK" within the 710 area code would be tagged phone=+1-710-555-5425 phone:mnemonic=+1-710-55-KLICK.

How to map





The phone numbers in the United States and Canada consist of the following four elements: "+" (plus sign), the international country code (1), the area code and the local telephone number (written in two memorable blocks). A locally formatted US number may look like this: (303) 555-1765 (without the international area code). The same phone number in E.164 format would be: +1 303 555 1765. However, the NANP notation (+1-303-355-1765) is used as a quasi-standard based on the local notation (see Usage section).

Phone numbers of telephone boxes

Even phone boxes have telephone numbers. Don't be confused. Telephone boxes must always be tagged with amenity=telephone to describe what the object is. You can add the phone=* tag to supply the extra detail of its telephone number (depending on how diligent you feel like being). But please take care: In germany public telephones do not have phone numbers any more, because the service that they were callable has been discontinued.

An old example was: phone=+49 4721 28695 for a public phone box on the German island Neuwerk.

Parsing phone numbers



Support for multiple countries



  • phone=+32 57 53 62 45 for the country where the amenity is,
  • phone:BE=+32 57 53 62 45 and phone:FR=+33 6 12654478 for different national phone numbers. Note that when using country codes, the convention is to make it uppercase, so it is not confused with a language code (but some mappers use lowercase instead).





Applications / Web services that display or dial the number from OSM

  • Galileo Offline Maps: Displays and dials the phone number of all types of indexed POI.

Alternative tags

Idea of deprecating either tags without contact: prefix or ones with contact prefix is repeatedly suggested, often triggering huge discussion and ending with conclusion that there is no consensus. Please, read past discussion before starting a new one[1][2][3].

See also