How do I get a local UK or Canadian number without being based there?

This page may contain affiliate links from which Blur Studio earns commissions.

A number with a foreign country code sitting on a quote, an invoice or a business card quietly discourages people from calling it. It reads as inconvenient or expensive to dial, even when it isn't. A local-looking number fixes that perception instantly, and the technology behind it, a virtual number that forwards to wherever you actually are, has been genuinely solved for years. The part that trips people up isn't the technology, it's picking the right country and understanding what "free" actually covers.

How a virtual local number actually works

A virtual number, like the ones Calilio, a VoIP business phone system, offers, is a real phone number with a specific country's area or city code, hosted by a VoIP provider rather than tied to a physical SIM card or landline in that country. When someone dials it, the call routes over the internet to wherever you've set it to ring, your mobile, a desk phone, or an app on your laptop, regardless of where you physically are. To the person calling, it looks and behaves exactly like a local number, because for their purposes, it is one.

The cheaper alternatives worth ruling out first

Before setting up a dedicated virtual number, consider whether a messaging app solves the actual problem. If your customers are comfortable reaching you on WhatsApp or a similar app instead of a phone call, that sidesteps the country-code issue entirely at no cost. This works well for younger or more internet-savvy customer bases and less well for anyone who specifically expects to pick up a phone and dial a normal number, which is still the majority of customers in plenty of industries. If your main cost is calling out, see how tocut the cost of calling suppliers abroad.

Step by step: how to set one up

1. Decide which country you actually need. If you have customers in several countries, you likely need a separate number per country rather than one number pretending to serve all of them. The wider process is explained ingetting a local phone number in another country for your customers.
2. Check which number types the provider offers there. Not every country supports every number type (local, toll-free, mobile) through every VoIP provider.
3. Pick a number once you've confirmed availability for your specific country and number type, for instance through Calilio's number selection.
4. Set where calls should ring. Most providers let you forward to a mobile number, a desk line, or an app, and some let you set different ring destinations by time of day. If you also travel, see how toget office calls while you travel.
5. Test it from an actual local phone in that country if you can, either your own or a contact's, to confirm call quality and that it genuinely rings through as expected.

What this costs on Calilio specifically

Verified directly on Calilio's own pricing page: one free local number is included, but specifically limited to the US, UK and Canada. If the country you need is outside those three, Calilio's free-number offer doesn't cover it, and you'd need to check current pricing and availability for that specific country directly, or look at a different provider that explicitly supports it. The free number itself sits on top of the Standard plan at $15 a month ($12 on annual billing), so the number is included in that base subscription rather than being a separate line item.

A worked example

Say a Dubai-based agency lands a handful of clients in the UK and wants those clients to feel like they're calling a local business, not dialing internationally every time they need something. A UK virtual number set to ring through to the agency's existing team in Dubai costs nothing extra on top of a Standard Calilio plan already in use for other reasons. The UK client dials a number that looks completely familiar to them; the call lands on the same phone the team already uses, with no change to how the agency actually operates day to day. The entire setup, from picking the number to testing the first call, usually takes under half an hour.

What I'd actually tell you

The number itself is the easy part. What actually matters is making sure whoever answers it sounds like they're genuinely familiar with that market, time zone and way of talking, not just answering a number that happens to have the right area code. A UK number answered at 3am your local time, sounding half-asleep and unaware it's the middle of a UK business day, undoes the whole point of having a local-feeling number. If you're spanning time zones, think about scheduling who answers which number, not just which number exists.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Assuming "free number" means free everywhere. The free local number on Calilio is specifically limited to the US, UK and Canada; a business that needs a number in, say, Australia or a European country outside that list needs to check separate pricing and availability before assuming the same offer applies.
• Setting the number up and forgetting to plan who actually answers it. A UK number is only genuinely useful if whoever answers it understands UK business hours, holidays and customer expectations. The number creates the first impression; the person answering has to live up to it. One option is asingle phone number that reaches whoever is working.
• Picking the country before confirming you actually have customers there in meaningful volume. A number set up speculatively, for a market that doesn't yet justify the attention, is easy to forget about and easy for a customer to notice is poorly maintained if they do call it.

A second worked example: a Canadian number for a US-based consultancy

Say a US-based consultancy picks up several ongoing Canadian clients and notices that Canadian clients hesitate slightly before dialing a US number for a quick call, even though the actual cost to them is negligible. Setting up a free Canadian local number on the same Standard Calilio plan the consultancy already pays for, forwarded to the same team's existing phones, removes that small hesitation entirely without adding a second phone system or asking staff to learn anything new. The number itself took under half an hour to activate and test; the only real decision was confirming which existing team member's hours actually overlap well with Canadian business hours, since the number existing doesn't automatically mean it's being answered at a sensible time for the person calling it.

When to skip this

Skip a dedicated local number if your customer base in that country is small enough that the handful of international-looking calls genuinely doesn't cost you business. It's also not worth setting up if your actual need is in a country outside the US, UK and Canada and the provider you're using doesn't clearly support it; confirm availability first rather than assuming any VoIP provider covers every country equally.

How I'd approach this

Where this grows beyond a settings page is when a business operating across several countries wants call routing tied to actual logic, send UK calls to whoever's on UK hours, Canada calls to whoever's awake there, automatically, rather than one person manually juggling several numbers. That's a real build on top of whatever VoIP platform you're using, and it's worth it once you're managing more than two or three country numbers by hand. Get in touch if you've outgrown doing this manually.