Atlas

Area codes
of Germany

Germany has 5,201 area codes, two to five digits each, and they are a prefix tree: the longer the code, the smaller the place. Every other map here is drawn on administrative boundaries the numbering plan happens to follow. This one is drawn on the plan itself — the regulator publishes a polygon for every code, and these are those polygons, gathered by their first two digits.

Grouping
20 — Western Ruhrgebiet (Essen and surroundings)21 — Düsseldorf and surroundings22 — Cologne and surroundings23 — Dortmund and surroundings24 — Aachen and surroundings25 — Münster and surroundings26 — Koblenz and surroundings27 — Siegen and surroundings28 — Wesel and surroundings29 — Sauerland (Meschede and surroundings)30 — Berlin33 — Brandenburg34 — Leipzig and surroundings35 — Dresden36 — Thüringen37 — Chemnitz and surroundings38 — Rostock and surroundings39 — Magdeburg, Neubrandenburg, and surroundings40 — Hamburg and surroundings41 — Further surroundings of Hamburg42 — Bremen and surroundings43 — Kiel and surroundings44 — Oldenburg and surroundings45 — Lübeck and surroundings46 — Flensburg and surroundings47 — Bremerhaven and surroundings48 — Heide and surroundings49 — Emden and surroundings50 — Nienburg-Wunstorf-Springe and surroundings51 — Hannover and surroundings52 — Bielefeld and surroundings53 — Braunschweig and surroundings54 — Osnabrück and surroundings55 — Göttingen and surroundings56 — Kassel and surroundings57 — Minden and surroundings58 — Uelzen and surroundings59 — Lingen (Ems) and surroundings60 — Northern and eastern surrounding of Frankfurt am Main61 — Rhine-Main Area, Southern Hesse62 — Rhine-Neckar63 — Palatine64 — Central Hesse65 — Moselle, Eifel, Hunsrück66 — Greater Fulda, Eastern Hesse67 — Rhenish Hesse, Eastern Hunsrück68 — Saarland69 — Frankfurt am Main, Offenbach am Main70 — Stuttgart and surroundings71 — Stuttgart and surroundings72 — Karlsruhe and surroundings73 — Ulm and surroundings74 — Rottweil and surroundings75 — Oberschwaben76 — Freiburg and surroundings77 — Südschwarzwald78 — Offenburg and Nordschwarzwald79 — Schwäbisch Hall and surroundings80 — Area 8081 — Hallbergmoos and surroundings82 — Augsburg and surroundings83 — Kempten Allgäu and surroundings84 — Ingolstadt and surroundings85 — Passau and surroundings86 — Traunstein and surroundings87 — Landshut and surroundings88 — Weilheim in Oberbayern and surroundings89 — München90 — Donauwörth and surroundings91 — Nürnberg/Fürth and surroundings92 — Bayreuth and surroundings93 — Würzburg and surroundings94 — Regensburg and surroundings95 — Bamberg and surroundings96 — Weiden (Oberpfalz) and surroundings97 — Bad Kissingen and surroundings98 — Ansbach and surroundings99 — Deggendorf and surroundings202122232425262728293033343536373839404142434445464748495051525354555657585960616263646566676869707172737475767778798081828384858687888990919293949596979899

How to read the map. Each patch is everything dialled on the same two digits, and the numeral on it is those digits — 22 is Cologne and its surroundings, 51 Hannover, 89 Munich. The colour is the first digit alone, the coarsest cut the plan makes and a real one: 2 is the Rhineland and the Ruhr, 3 the east, 4 the north coast, 6 the Rhine-Main, 7 the south-west, 8 and 9 Bavaria. Four codes are two digits long and are areas by themselves — 30 Berlin, 40 Hamburg, 69 Frankfurt, 89 Munich.

Where these boundaries come from. The Bundesnetzagentur publishes the Ortsnetzbereiche: one polygon per area code, 5,201 of them, the regulator's own lines rather than anyone's reconstruction. No other country in this atlas has that — the rest are drawn on provinces and states that the codes follow only approximately. So the edges here are not an approximation of the dialling areas. They are the dialling areas.

What the panel lists, and what it does not. The panel carries the 89 codes of two and three digits — the cities. The other 5,112 are four and five digits, and they are villages; naming all of them would put half a megabyte of text into the page to answer what the patch already answers. Every one of them is still on the map, because they are what the patches are made of. Sixty-one areas are named by the source; seventeen more take the name of their only three-digit exchange, which is what a three-digit code means. Area 80, around the Tegernsee and Rosenheim, has no three-digit exchange and no name in the sources, so it keeps its number.

Sources. Geometry and codes: Bundesnetzagentur, Ortsnetzbereiche, Ortsnetzkennzahlen und Ortsnetzbereichsgrenzen — the regulator's own boundary file, one polygon per code. Boundary file as GeoJSON: railslove/german-onb-geojson, which converts the agency's ArcView shapefile to WGS84 lon/lat. Area names: Wikipedia, List of dialling codes in Germany, for what each area and each city code is called.