323 Area Code – Los Angeles, California: Location, Time Zone & History

In 1998, Los Angeles's phone map was redrawn when area code 323 split away from 213, taking Hollywood, Silver Lake, Los Feliz, East Los Angeles, and a band of southeast LA County cities while 213 held on to downtown and its immediate neighbors. The split placed the Hollywood Sign and the Hollywood Walk of Fame inside the newer code rather than the older one, a detail longtime residents still note.

Growth pressures eventually caught up with the young code: in July 2017, 213 and 323 were recombined into a single overlay complex, with ten-digit dialing made mandatory and new numbers drawn from either code across the shared territory. By November 2024, a third code, 738, was activated as a second overlay to address continuing number exhaustion, a sign of decades of demographic growth across Hollywood, East Los Angeles, Huntington Park, Montebello, Bell, and South Gate.

Beyond entertainment and film production long associated with Hollywood, the territory also supports fashion and garment manufacturing, food processing centered on the Vernon industrial corridor, and a dense mix of retail and small businesses serving its many neighborhoods.