Free carrier lookup
Enter any US number and get its current carrier, line type and location in about 100ms. Three free lookups a day — no account, no card.
Live demo
Enter any US number — this hits the production API, not a canned response.
3 free lookups per visitor, per day
The result
Four useful facts about the number, and nothing about the person holding it.
carrier
Who holds the number today, after any transfers. A number issued by AT&T and since moved to T-Mobile returns T-Mobile.
line_type
The single most useful field. It decides whether an SMS can arrive at all, and flags numbers worth a closer look.
city / state
The region the number block was assigned to. Not where the person is now — numbers travel with their owners.
valid
Whether the number is assigned and in service, as opposed to merely well-formed. Most fake numbers are well-formed.
Line types
Counts are the number ranges of each type in our carrier data, not a sample.
A phone in someone's pocket. Can receive SMS, lowest fraud risk.
Cannot receive SMS. An OTP sent here is silently lost — the send reports success and nobody sees it.
Internet-based. Legitimate but cheap to create and discard, so worth a second look at signup.
The range exists but its type is not classified. Treat conservatively rather than rejecting outright.
Why most lookups are wrong
Americans have been able to keep their number when changing carrier since 2003. Free tools that map an area code and prefix to a carrier were built before that mattered, and they still answer with whoever originally owned the range.
For a number that has never moved, they are right. For one that has, they are confidently wrong, and nothing in the answer tells you which case you are looking at.
Every US carrier must report a port to the Number Portability Administration Center within 24 hours. We sync that data daily, so the carrier you see is the one holding the number now.
The same number, two answers
Original carrier
Carrier holding it today
What people use it for
Every message sent to a landline is paid for and never seen. On a list collected over years, that is a steady, invisible waste.
What a lookup returns, field by fieldDisposable VoIP numbers are the cheapest way to create accounts in bulk. Knowing the line type turns that into a decision you can make.
How real-time verification helpsNumbers gathered without validation accumulate disconnections and wrong types. One pass tells you what is still real.
Validating US numbers in your appBeyond three a day
The tool above is for checking a number by hand. For anything repeated, there is an API.
3 lookups per day
You are using it
10 lookups to start
5,000 lookups
Yes. Three lookups per visitor per day, with no account and no card. The limit exists because each lookup queries a live carrier database, not a cached list. If you need more than a handful, a free account adds ten more, and credit packs start at $25 for 5,000.
For US numbers it is very accurate, because carrier assignments are recorded centrally. Every US carrier is required to report number ports to the Number Portability Administration Center within 24 hours, so a lookup that queries that data returns the carrier holding the number today — not the one that originally issued it.
Not here. PilotLookup covers US and Canadian numbers under the North American Numbering Plan. Most countries have no central portability database equivalent to the NPAC, which is why international carrier data is generally less reliable.
No, and it is worth being clear about this. A carrier lookup returns information about the number — its carrier, line type and the region its range was assigned to. It returns no name, no address and nothing else identifying the subscriber. That is a reverse phone lookup, which is a different and far more privacy-invasive thing.
The number is served over the internet rather than a mobile or fixed network — Google Voice, TextNow, Twilio and similar. VoIP numbers are legitimate and widely used, but they can be created in seconds and discarded, which is why they carry higher fraud risk at signup. Treat it as a signal to look closer, not as proof of anything.
No. Numbers submitted to the lookup are not stored or logged against you. The daily limit is counted per visitor, not per number.
Three lookups per visitor per day, counted by IP address and reset daily. If several people share a connection — an office or university network — the limit is shared too. A free account comes with ten more lookups.
Ready when you are
Create an account, grab an API key and run your first lookup. Ten free lookups, no credit card.