By contrast, calls to metropolitan France from the overseas departments only required the use of the trunk code 16.

[1] However, under the new present French numbering plan, direct dialing was introduced for calls between the DOMs (including collectivités territoriales) and metropolitan France, requiring only the '0' to be dialed, with the country code being used as a geographical area code.

[8] On that date, France changed to a system of two zones, one for Paris and the surrounding Île-de-France and another for the other departments.

[10] To call the rest of France from Paris, however, the trunk prefix 16 had to be dialed before the eight-digit number.

On 18 October 1996, this changed to the present "ten-digit" system (including the default one-digit leading trunk code 0), in which each call is dialed using all ten digits, this national scheme being also extended to cover Overseas France in a single area.

Following liberalisation in 1998, subscribers (first deployed on land lines and rapidly extended to all mobile networks) could access different carriers by replacing the leading trunk code 0 (omitted from numbers when called from outside France) with another carrier selection code (one digit from 2 to 9, or four digits 16xx).

Until 17 December 1994, Andorra formed part of the French numbering plan, with calls from France requiring the prefix 628,[13] (or 16 628 from Paris).

[18] On 21 June 1996, Monaco similarly adopted its own country code +377, replacing access from France (+33 93).