862 Area Code – Newark, New Jersey: Location, Time Zone & History

Newark, New Jersey's largest city and a historic hub for insurance and transportation, anchors area code 862. It arrived as an all-services overlay on area code 973, put into service by NANPA on December 29, 2001 after mandatory ten-digit local dialing began across the region that December 1st. The 862/973 footprint spans Bergen, Essex, Hudson, Morris, Passaic, Sussex, and Union counties, in whole or part.

973 itself had only been split from 201 in 1997 to relieve numbering exhaustion in northern New Jersey. But growth in cellphones, pagers, and fax lines pushed 973 toward exhaustion again within just a few years, and regulators chose an overlay rather than another geographic split. Because of that, longtime Newark-area residents and businesses often kept their original 973 numbers as a point of local identity, while newer lines were issued 862.

The region's economy runs on movement of goods and people: Newark Liberty International Airport and the Port Newark-Elizabeth Marine Terminal are among the busiest in the country. Prudential Financial is headquartered in Newark, and higher education is represented by Rutgers University-Newark, NJIT, and Seton Hall. The area is also a center for pharmaceuticals and healthcare within the New York metropolitan orbit.