A Mexican number is ten digits, and the first two or three are the area code: 55 is Mexico City, 33 Guadalajara, 81 Monterrey, 999 Mérida. There are four hundred of them, and this map draws each one on the municipalities whose seat dials it, from the regulator's own locality list. The colour is the first digit — the eight numbering zones, which since 2025 are all the geography the plan still has.
How to read the map. Each patch is a code and the numeral on it is what you dial there. The colour is the first digit, which is one of eight zones the regulator defines by municipality: 2 is the east, around Puebla and Veracruz; 3 the west around Guadalajara; 4 the north-centre; 5 Mexico City and its valley; 6 the north-west; 7 the south-west; 8 the north-east; 9 the south-east. Four codes are two digits long — 55 and 56 for Mexico City, 33 for Guadalajara, 81 for Monterrey — and the rest are three. Where a second code was laid over a city that ran out of numbers it shares the patch and is written beside the first, as 55/56 or 663/664; Puebla has three and carries the range.
Where the lines come from. The Instituto Federal de Telecomunicaciones publishes no boundaries for its codes, only the list of localities each one serves, keyed to the census. So the patches are municipalities, from INEGI's own boundaries, and each is drawn in the code its seat dials in that list — the last edition that had one, from November 2020. Where the seat is not listed, the municipality's largest listed locality decides, which happens 81 times. And 425 municipalities, 279 of them in Oaxaca, have no listed locality at all; each takes the code of the nearest municipality that has one, inside the zone the regulator puts it in. Three seats dial a code from a different zone than the regulator assigns the rest of their municipality — La Yesca, Tecolutla and Aquila — and twenty localities are moved between zones on their own; those are below the municipality and the map cannot show them.
What changed in 2025. Since July 2025 the regulator assigns numbers by zone, not by code: a new block belongs to a first digit and nothing smaller, and the public plan no longer names a locality at all. The codes on this map are the ones every existing number still carries. Nine were opened between the 2020 list and now; three of them are documented as second codes for Puebla, San Luis Potosí and Mérida and are drawn with them, and the other six — 450, 660, 720, 770, 870 and 960 — are listed in the panel under their zone, because nothing published says where they are. One older code, 658 for Los Algodones on the Californian border, is in the panel but not on the map: the town is inside Mexicali, whose seat dials 686.
Sources. Code list: Instituto Federal de Telecomunicaciones, Plan Nacional de Numeración, public download — every assigned block, read for which codes exist and when each was opened. Localities per code: the same plan as published on 20 November 2020, the last edition that named each block's locality by its INEGI census key, as mirrored on GitHub. Zones: Instituto Federal de Telecomunicaciones, definición geográfica de las zonas de numeración, one PDF per zone listing the states and municipalities it comprises. Place names: Wikipedia, Area codes in Mexico by code, for the accented spelling of each principal town. Geometry: INEGI's Marco Geoestadístico as published by CONABIO in 2023, converted to GeoJSON in PhantomInsights/mexico-geojson, dissolved by code, by zone and by state.