Area code 253
area code for areas near Tacoma, Washington, United States
Area code 253 is a telephone area code in the North American Numbering Plan (NANP) for a part of the U.S. state of Washington. The numbering plan area (NPA) includes cities in King County that are situated south of Seattle and the southern Puget Sound area, centered at Tacoma and extending to include the areas around Gig Harbor, Auburn, and Roy. It also serves the western half of Pierce County, as well as southern King County.
History
On April 27, 1997, numbering plan area 206 in Washington was divided into three geographic service areas, due to "substantial number growth" in the Seattle area of the state. The core area around Seattle and nearby cities retained the existing area code, while the second NPA, north and east of Lake Washington received area code 425.
The remaining area comprising Kent, Federal Way, Tacoma, Lakebay, Fox Island, Gig Harbor, Burley, was assigned area code 253.
Area code 253 is slated to participate in the overlay complex 564, which has been active since 2017 only in NPA 360, when central office code exhaustion demands relief.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Area code 253” is area code for areas near Tacoma, Washington, United States. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Area, code and area, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4788560. Authority coordinates are 47.240, -122.450. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1997 and 2017.
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This entry incorporates text from “Area code 253” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.