Premium-rate numbers in Belgium: what they really cost

A call to a Belgian 0900 number costs a maximum of €0.50 per minute, a 0903 up to €1.50, and a 0909 up to €31 for a single call. Those caps come from the Royal Decree of 27 April 2007. The real trap is not the headline rate: it is that none of those minutes are covered by your plan.

A premium-rate number is a number where part of the price paid by the caller pays for the service itself, on top of carrying the call. In Belgium these numbers live in reserved ranges: 070, 077, and 0900 to 0909. Everything else — 02, 03, 04, 09, the 078 range, mobile numbers starting 04xx — is billed at your ordinary subscription rate.

The Belgian rate card, checked on 22 August 2026

Here are the legal caps, VAT included, as published by Belgian operators. They are maximums: a provider may charge less, never more.

Checked on 22 August 2026 on the support pages of Orange Belgium (its own mobile network, plus the Walloon cable network since it absorbed VOO) and Mega Telecom (a virtual operator riding on the Orange network). Legal basis: the Royal Decree of 27 April 2007 on the numbering plan, overseen by the BIPT/IBPT, the Belgian telecom regulator.

One detail deserves to be said plainly, because it stopped us mid-draft: the two operators do not publish the same unit for the 070 range. Orange writes "€0.30/min", Mega writes "€0.30 per call". Same divergence on 0901, advertised as "€0.50/call or €0.50/min" by one and "€0.50 per call" by the other. We are not going to arbitrate: both pages were live on the same day, and the gap changes the cost of a ten-minute call by a factor of ten.

Put plainly: assume it is per minute, and listen to the rate announcement before staying on the line.

What does a call to a 0900 number really cost?

Five euros, at the very most. Not because the rate is low, but because a Belgian rule cuts the call automatically after ten minutes on every per-minute 090x number.

That duration cap is the most useful protection in the whole scheme, and almost nobody knows about it. It turns a per-minute rate — in theory unlimited — into a maximum cost per call, worked out range by range below.

Our own calculations, from the caps above and the automatic cut-off rule. August 2026.

Look at the last row. A 0909 charges €31 for one call whatever its length: the ten-minute cut-off does nothing, because the price does not depend on time spent. Same logic for 0905, heavily used by games and TV competitions. That is exactly where three-figure bills come from, when somebody redials the same number five times believing only the first attempt counts.

And it has to be said: the real risk is not the single call. It is the repetition.

070, 078, 0800: which one is actually premium-rated?

The 070 is. The 078 is not. The 0800 is free. This three-way confusion costs Belgian households more than any callback scam, because it applies to numbers people dial deliberately, in good faith, usually to reach a customer service desk.

A 078 number is national and non-geographic: it tells you nothing about where the company sits, but it is billed as an ordinary national call, so it comes out of your plan if you have minutes left. It is the number chosen by serious companies that want one nationwide line without charging their customers for it. Card Stop, the Belgian bank card blocking service, is the best-known example at 078 170 170 — and it is free of charge today.

The 070 range, by contrast, pays the company you are calling. At €0.30 a minute, a twelve-minute wait in an after-sales queue costs €3.60 to a customer ringing about a faulty product. The FPS Economy (SPF Économie, the federal consumer authority) is clear on this: a company you already have a contract with may not run its customer service on an expensive number. If your operator, your energy supplier or your insurer sends you to a 070 number for an open case, they are in breach. The rule is old and still routinely ignored, particularly by distance-selling after-sales desks. It is worth quoting verbatim in a complaint letter, because it moves the discussion off commercial ground and onto legal ground.

The unlimited calls trap

No plan covers these numbers. Ever.

Belgian operators put it in writing on their support pages: calls to 090x and 070 numbers "are not included in your plan", because the service is delivered by an external provider and your operator merely collects on their behalf. So you pay your unlimited subscription, and then you pay for the call.

What Belgian law gives you before you pay

Three safeguards exist, and they are far more concrete than the average of Belgian telecom consumer protection.

The first is the free rate announcement. As soon as a call exceeds €1 per call or €1 per minute, a message states the maximum rate before you are connected, free of charge, and you can hang up immediately afterwards without being billed. In practice: on a 0903, a 0904, a 0907 or a 0909, you always know the cost before the meter starts. On a 0900 at €0.50, you do not — the €1 threshold is not reached, so no announcement is required, and that is the hole in the scheme.

The second is the automatic ten-minute cut-off on per-minute 090x numbers, detailed above.

The third is the ban on expensive numbers for existing customers. The FPS Economy repeats it: if you already have a contract with a company, its customer service cannot run through a premium-rate number. It is the most effective lever in a dispute, and the least used.

How do you block these numbers at your operator?

By calling customer service and asking for a premium call restriction. It is free at every Belgian operator, it takes one conversation, and it remains the only way to be protected before the bill rather than after.

The scope, however, is not the same everywhere, and nobody will volunteer that information. Orange (its own mobile network) advertises blocking of all calls to premium 090x and 07x numbers, with two exceptions kept deliberately reachable: 070 245 245 for the Poison Control Centre and 078 170 170 for Card Stop. Proximus (its own copper, fibre and mobile networks) offers a free premium call restriction whose page lists the 090x ranges. At Telenet and BASE (their own cable network in Flanders and Brussels, BASE belonging to the Telenet group), blocking also exists and is requested from customer service.

What the free block covers and does not cover, before you switch it on:

• Covered: outgoing calls to the 090x ranges, and depending on the operator the 07x ranges.
• Covered separately: premium SMS and MMS, which are a distinct option — switching one on does not switch the other on.
• Not covered: foreign premium numbers, which fall outside the Belgian numbering plan and are dialled with an international code.
• Not covered: subscriptions already signed up to by SMS, which have to be stopped by texting "STOP" to the short code concerned.
• Ask line by line: the block applies to a number, not to a contract. On a family bundle you have to request it for every SIM card and for the landline.

That last point is the one everybody forgets. A household that blocks the parent's line and leaves the teenager's line open has protected nothing at all, and the teenager's line is precisely the one that competitions and games are aiming at.

Premium SMS follow a different rate card

Four-digit short codes have their own grid, independent of the call rates: €1 maximum for a 2xxx code, €4 for a 3xxx, €2 for a 6xxx games or ringtones code, €4 for a 7xxx adult code, and up to €31 for a 4xxx micropayment code. Short codes starting 8xxx are always free, both to send and to receive.

The provider is required to state the price of the SMS. In subscription services, messages sent and received can both be charged, which explains bills that swell without anyone doing anything new. To stop it: text "STOP" to the short code in question, then ask your operator to block premium SMS.

The bill has already landed: your options

Start with your operator, with a written dispute quoting the exact lines. It is not the service provider, but it collects on their behalf and holds the premium partner's contact details — which you can also look up yourself on crdc.be, the database run by the NPA non-profit, the same one used to find out which operator owns a Belgian number.

If the operator refuses, two doors remain open. The Telecommunications Ombudsman Service (Service de médiation pour les télécommunications) handles billing disputes between a Belgian subscriber and their operator free of charge. The FPS Economy takes reports of consumer law breaches and documents phone number scams, including the one-ring call designed to make you dial back a paying number. Its information line is 0800 120 33, a freephone number — which, on this particular subject, is a nice touch.

One last thing. If the number that called you starts with 04, it is not premium-rated: it is an ordinary Belgian mobile, and the risk lies elsewhere, in what you say on the phone. We documented that in our piece on the 0466 prefix and the virtual numbers rented by call centres. And if your telecom bill is drifting for far more mundane reasons than premium numbers, our six-step method to cut it tackles the rest. To compare the subscriptions themselves, our mobile operator ranking is the place to start.