Alberta to Receive 6th Area Code by 2028

Alberta’s growing population has prompted the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) to approve a sixth area code for the province to keep up with demand for new phone numbers.

The CRTC said on Sept. 29 it had approved the creation of area code 568, which will accompany the existing prefixes in Alberta of 403, 780, 587, 368, and 825.

Albertans will start using the new telephone prefix by June 10, 2028, eight months earlier than the CRTC expected the province to require a new area code, in February 2029.

Recent Statistics Canada data showed that the province’s population grew by 1.5 percent, or 76,419 more people, between July 1, 2025, and July 1, 2026, a rate triple that of Canada as a whole. Also, from July 1, 2024, to July 1, 2025, Alberta’s population grew by 2.5 percent, or 120,316 more people, the largest growth rate in the country that year.

Meanwhile, the data showed that Canada’s overall population grew by 0.5 percent in 2025–26, adding 189,425 people, the lowest July-to-July growth rate since 1944–45.

The CRTC manages telephone numbers through the Canadian Numbering Administrator (CNA) and allocates numbering resources as needed.

The commission said it directed the CNA in May to form an ad hoc committee to review the issue, since federal guidelines require “relief planning activities” to commence if an area code is projected to require new resources within the next 36 months.

The committee met later in May to address the issue, and it filed its report in July recommending that a “distributed overlay” area code be applied.

The ad hoc committee said it recommended the June 2028 date since that would give carriers and customers advance notice and sufficient lead time to implement the 568 area code.

Along with the report, the committee submitted a planning document analyzing options to provide additional numbers and recommending how the CRTC should implement them. The group also submitted a relief implementation plan, including detailed steps all affected parties could take to implement the new code.

The CRTC said the distributed overlay method does not require customers to change their telephone numbers, as previous methods did, which included splitting area codes, realigning code boundaries, and implementing concentrated overlay area codes.

The federal telecommunications regulator also said that this suggested method does not increase the administrative burden on the telecommunications industry.

The CRTC added that since Alberta’s original telephone prefix of 403 is a distributed overlay area code, it believed that “the most logical method” for providing access to new phone numbers was to add another distributed overlay area code.