Enter a phone number to see whether it is a cell phone, a landline or VoIP, plus the carrier its number block was allocated to. Nothing is called or texted.
25 free checks a day from this address.
Run the whole file through the free cleaner — it works in this browser, needs no account, and the file is not uploaded anywhere. That covers formatting, duplicates and numbers that cannot be valid.
For the parts a browser cannot do — whether each block was ever allocated, its line type and its original carrier — we will email a trial key for the desktop app: 50,000 numbers, offline, no card, Windows only. It also raises this page from 25 checks a day to 100. Nothing else is sent to you.
You can tell without calling it. Every phone number is issued from a block, and the numbering plan records what kind of service each block is for. This checker matches the number to its block and reads that record.
How the answer is found depends on the country:
Most countries issue mobile and fixed-line numbers from separate ranges. In the UK, mobile numbers start 07 and geographic landlines start 01 or 02. In Germany, mobiles start 015, 016 or 017. The number itself tells you, and the answer is firm.
Mobile and landline numbers share the same area codes and look identical. The answer comes from the carrier holding the block: a block issued to T-Mobile or Verizon Wireless is mobile, one issued to a local telephone company is landline, and one issued to an internet telephony provider is VoIP. That is why the carrier is shown next to the line type.
Most landlines cannot receive SMS. A text sent to one is usually dropped or refused, and many senders still bill for the attempt. Removing landlines before a campaign is the cheapest way to cut failed sends. See how to clean a phone list before an SMS campaign.
In the US, the TCPA treats calls and texts to cell phones differently from calls to landlines, particularly for autodialled and prerecorded messages. Knowing which numbers are mobile is the first step in handling consent correctly. This is not legal advice; talk to a lawyer about your own campaign.
VoIP numbers come from internet calling services. They can receive calls and often texts, but sign-up forms and fraud checks frequently treat them with suspicion. If that is your question, the VoIP number lookup explains what the result can and cannot tell you.
Number portability. A subscriber can move a number from a landline company to a mobile network, or from a mobile network to a VoIP service, and keep the digits. The block record does not change when that happens, so any checker built on allocation data, including this one, reports the line type the number was issued with.
Landline-to-mobile ports are the most common case. For most lists the allocation answer is right for the large majority of numbers. When you need the current line type for every number, a paid live query (Twilio Lookup, Telnyx) is the only source, and it is cheapest to run it after a free pass has removed the numbers that cannot be valid. The guide to mobile, landline and VoIP goes into the detail.
Most people guess that mobile dominates. At the level the numbering plan is administered, it does not. Every US number belongs to a six-digit NPA-NXX exchange, and these are all 226,841 of them, counted from the same data this checker queries:
| Line type | Exchanges | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Landline | 98,247 | 43.3% |
| Mobile | 71,798 | 31.7% |
| VoIP | 27,229 | 12.0% |
| Special use | 20,022 | 8.8% |
| Unclassified | 9,544 | 4.2% |
Counted from Phonelint's numbering table, 1 November 2026. Exchanges, not subscribers — a mobile exchange can hold far more live numbers than a landline one, so this is not a count of phones.
Two things follow. A number drawn at random from a US list is more likely to sit in a landline exchange than a mobile one, which is why a list nobody has scrubbed usually carries more landlines than its owner expects. And 13% of exchanges are special-use or unclassified, so an honest checker sometimes has to answer "no line type on record" rather than guess. This one does.
A checker that will not tell you its error rate is asking you to guess. Phonelint's line-type output was measured against two paid live services on an out-of-sample set, with the method registered before the run:
| Mobile detection | Result | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Recall | 96% | of the numbers a paid service called mobile, this one agreed |
| Precision | 91–97% | of the numbers this one calls mobile, the share a paid service agrees on |
| Reference disagreement | 27% | how often the two paid services contradict each other |
Benchmark v2, September 2026, out of sample, with the method registered before the run. Full counts in the accuracy benchmark.
The last row puts the other two in proportion. The two paid references contradict each other on more than a quarter of the numbers, so there is no oracle to be accurate against. The precision range exists for the same reason: it moves between 91% and 97% purely depending on which paid service you decide to treat as truth. Any product quoting a single accuracy figure for line type is quoting one reference's opinion and calling it a fact.
If only one thing survives from this section: a mobile verdict here is a strong signal, and a cannot be valid verdict is close to certain, because a number outside every allocated block has nothing to ring.
Detecting numbers that cannot be valid is a different and much stronger claim. A number outside any allocated block cannot ring, which is deterministic rather than statistical: 80% of the invalid verdicts were confirmed by both paid services, and none of the disagreements were numbers both references called live.
This page answers one number at a time because that is what a single question needs. A list is a different problem, and the arithmetic is what usually decides it. Live per-lookup pricing, checked September 2026:
| 100,000 numbers | Per number | Per run |
|---|---|---|
| Twilio Lookup (line type) | $0.008 | $800 |
| Telnyx | $0.0015 | $150 |
| Numverify Enterprise | metered | $129.99/mo, capped at 250,000 |
| Phonelint desktop | — | $29 once, unlimited runs |
Third-party prices checked September 2026 and may have changed.
The recurrence is the real argument rather than the first invoice: a list gets re-checked every time it is reused, and a per-lookup meter charges again each time. Locally the same million numbers take 21.2 seconds, about 47,000 a second, measured on a mid-range Windows laptop, so re-running costs nothing in time either. The sensible order is a free local pass first to drop everything that cannot be valid, then pay for live lookups only on the numbers that survive it.
Yes. Enter it above. The checker matches the number to the block it was issued from and reports that block's line type: cell phone (mobile), landline or VoIP. Nothing is called or texted.
Outside North America, usually yes: most countries use separate ranges for mobile and fixed lines, such as 07 for UK mobiles. In the US and Canada, no: cell phones and landlines share area codes, so you need a lookup against the carrier that holds the number's block.
No. The check is a match against numbering-plan data. No call, text or network query reaches the number.
It was probably ported. A number moved from a landline company to a mobile network keeps the line type of the block it was issued from. Only a paid live lookup returns the current line type for a ported number.
Yes. The free bulk cleaner formats and de-duplicates a list in your browser, and the Phonelint desktop app labels every number in a list as mobile, landline or VoIP offline, at tens of thousands of numbers a second.
Yes, with no account, up to 25 checks a day, or 100 a day if you add an email address.
Clean 50,000 numbers in your browser free, or label millions by line type offline with the desktop app. Neither uploads your list.