The 505 area code covers central and northern New Mexico, spanning Albuquerque, Santa Fe (the state capital and a major arts and tourism destination), Rio Rancho (one of the fastest-growing cities in the Southwest), Los Alamos (home to Los Alamos National Laboratory), Taos, Gallup, and Farmington, with most of the state's population concentrated in the Albuquerque metro and the Rio Grande corridor stretching north toward Taos and Santa Fe. It was one of the original codes established in 1947 under the North American Numbering Plan, when AT&T first divided the continent into geographic regions; at launch 505 covered the entirety of New Mexico for nearly six decades until the explosion of mobile phones, VoIP lines, and fax numbers strained the pool, leading regulators to split the state on March 15, 2007 — southern and eastern New Mexico, including Las Cruces, Roswell, and Alamogordo, moved to a new area code, echoing the same single-code-to-split pattern behind Utah's 385 area code, while central and northern New Mexico kept the original 505 digits. The region runs on Mountain Time, observing MST in winter and MDT from mid-March through early November. The area code serves government agencies, university campuses including the University of New Mexico, and technology, national security, and biomedical employers anchored by Sandia National Laboratories and Kirtland Air Force Base, alongside resort communities like Taos and the Santa Fe arts district. Common scam patterns spoofing 505 numbers include IRS and Social Security impersonation, fake utility shutoff threats, one-ring Wangiri callback scams, and neighbor spoofing that matches a victim's own prefix; recipients are advised to hang up without sharing information, verify callers by dialing organizations' official numbers directly, and report suspicious calls to the FTC. A local 505 number can be provisioned through a cloud platform like Softtop by searching New Mexico inventory, regardless of where the business is physically located.