Change Your Tracfone Number

You can change your Tracfone number when you move to a new area? It can be pretty simple if all goes well, though you may have to get a new SIM card and re-activate the phone.

Why change your number when you move?

To Make Sure 911 works.

While I'm not certain about this, my motivation was to make sure that if I needed to dial 911 in case anything happened to me or my family, I would reach the nearest 911 dispatch office and not the one where I've moved from.

Do You Have to Do It?

  1. Transferring your number from one phone to another
  2. or

  3. Changing your number because the area code associated with your address has been re-assigned even though you haven't moved

In my case, I had moved.

So, first I'll go over the standard procedure and then tell you if it worked in my case. But before we go on, you may be asking yourself . . .

Now you and I both know many people who keep the same cell phone number whenever they move so that family and friends don't have to update their phone books and they don't miss any calls.

They simply update the address with their cell phone company and start receiving their bills at their new address, if they still receive paper bills. That may or may not be enough to re-set your info for when you call 911. I don't know.

Since I use a prepaid cell phone and don't receive any bills, I wanted to make sure my phone number is the appropriate one for new zip code.

Procedure

  1. Call TracFone Customer Support at 800-867-7183
  2. Choose Option 1 or 2 for English or Spanish

    Choose Option 1 for Tracfone (Option 2 is for Safelink)

    Choose Option 4 for Technical Support

  3. Give the Customer Support Rep your TracFone's Info:
  4. Give your TracFone Serial Number located in the Prepaid Menu.

    Give your current Tracfone Phone Number located in the Prepaid Menu.

    Give your new Zip code.

    Give your Tracfone SIM card number located in the Prepaid menu.

  5. Then you're done and all you have to do is leave the phone TURNED ON.
  6. It may take a while for the phone number to be updated.

What Happened

I waited 48 hours and my number still had NOT changed. I called up  support again to try and fix this.

A new SIM card

Since the automatic procedure did not work, the TracFone rep told me they would send me a new SIM in the mail and I would have to re-activate the phone.

I was a little disappointed, but not too much, since I still had a working phone and would just have to wait a couple of days more until I had a local cell phone number. I was told that I would still retain all my minutes and service time left on the phone.

One Day Later!

Tracfone sent a new SIM card overnight via Fedex, which was pretty good. I inserted the new card and tried re-activating the phone online, but that didn't work. So I called up Tracfone, skipped the automated menu and got to a person by asking for an "Agent, please!" several times.

A Tracfone agent took my phone's Serial number and SIM card (all available from the phone's "Prepaid" menu) and, within a few minutes, I had a new local number!

So, all in all, a little bit of a hassle to change your Tracfone number but not all that bad.