e.164 Phone format

If you are an admin editing people in Church Admin Plugin, you will notice a new people form field also asking for a mobile number in e.164 format. This is an internationally recognised format for phone numbers which the Bulk SMS format is using. It will have been automatically generated for current entries – but some users in border areas may wish to change the country code etc.

Here’s the format

E.164 phone number formatting entails the following:

  1. A + (plus) sign (replacing the International Call Prefix like 011)
  2. International Country Calling code
  3. Local Area code
  4. Local Phone number

US Example

The White House switchboard number is 202-456-1414, sometimes written as (202) 456-1414

The 202 is the Local area code and 456-1414 is the local phone number.

In e.164 the number would be +12024561414

The US international calling code is 1

UK Example

The Buckingham Palace switchboard number is (+44) (0)20 7930 4832.

44 is the International dialling code

So we remove the leading 0 of the rest of the number to get

+442079304832