How To Hide Your Phone Number On Outgoing Calls

While hiding your number may not be the best idea if you actually want people to pick up your call, you may have a legitimate reason for wanting to hide your number from coming up on the receiver’s phone. Here’s how you can do it.

While we first wrote about this in 2013, it’s worth an update to make sure that these solutions are still up to date with our ever-changing phones and their operating systems.

To hide your number on a per call basis, you just have to add a few extra numbers before you dial. Telstra provides the following instructions:

•From a home phone, dial 1831 then the number you’re calling
•From a mobile phone, dial #31# then the number you’re calling

Optus instead instructs to dial 1831 for both fixed lines and mobiles and commenters in the original article have testified that this number works for mobile phones.

If you want to turn off your caller ID on a more permanent basis, there are options to do so from most mobile phones:

iOS: In settings, scroll down to ‘Phone’, tap ‘Show My Caller ID’ and then turn that setting off.
Android: From the settings menu, choose ‘Call’ and then choose ‘More Settings’. The first option will allow you to hide your Caller ID on outgoing calls by default.
Windows Phone 8: Go to the dialler, choose the ellipses, then ‘Settings’, then ‘Show My Caller ID’.
Blackberry: Swipe down in the phone dialler and choose the cog icon. The default option is ‘Show My Number’. Tapping on that should bring up ‘Allow My Number to Appear’ which you can then switch to off.

Some telcos like Optus will also allow you to switch it off from your account rather than from the phone. The instructions for Optus accounts are here, while Telstra will charge a $2.93 monthly fee to do the same for your home phone.

Happy calling!