There is no phone number you can call to get an ordinary yellow cab in New York. No central dispatch, no hotline. The Taxi and Limousine Commission does not run one, and the pages that promise you a number are, without exception, not going to give you one.
What does exist is a short list of numbers that genuinely work, each for a specific situation. Every one below was checked against the operator’s own site or nyc.gov on 27 August 2026.
The one number that gets you a yellow cab
Accessible Dispatch: 646-599-9999. This is the real thing, and it is the number most people who need it have never been told. It dispatches a wheelchair-accessible yellow taxi, trips start in all five boroughs, and you pay the standard metered rate with no additional fee. Drop-offs cover the five boroughs, Westchester, Nassau and the three regional airports. Dialling 311 reaches it too.
Source: nyc.gov, Find an Accessible Ride and accessibledispatch.com rider FAQ, both retrieved 27 August 2026.
Booking a ride by phone with no smartphone
Uber Call to Ride: 1-833-USE-UBER (1-833-873-8237). A genuine Uber service, and not a well-known one. A person answers, and you can book on demand or up to 90 days ahead, anywhere Uber operates in the US. English or Spanish. You need an account, but if you do not have one they will set it up on the call — no smartphone required at any point.
- Hours are 5:00am to 1:00am Eastern, daily. The app stays 24/7, but this line does not.
- Wheelchair-accessible vehicles through this line are available in New York City and Chicago only.
Source: uber.com, Call to Ride, retrieved 27 August 2026.
Lyft has no equivalent. You cannot book a Lyft by phone in the United States. Lyft Silver, aimed at older riders, does include live phone support, but it is callback-only and for help rather than booking — you tap for help in the app and leave a number. If a page tells you to ring Lyft for a car, it is wrong.
Car services that do take phone bookings
These are for-hire vehicles, not yellow cabs, and the legal difference matters to you: they must be pre-arranged and cannot legally pick you up off the street, and the fare is a flat or quoted rate rather than a meter.
- Dial 7 — 212-777-7777. Operating since 1977. Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Long Island; JFK, Newark, LaGuardia, Teterboro, Westchester and MacArthur.
- Carmel Car & Limo — 1-866-666-6666, or +1 212-666-6666 from outside the US. Operating since 1978, airport transfers a speciality.
- Northside Car Service — 718-387-2222. Brooklyn-based, at 207 Bedford Avenue, with published fixed airport rates.
Each number is taken from the company’s own website, retrieved 27 August 2026.
The apps that hail an actual yellow cab
If you have a phone but no cab in sight, the TLC licenses three e-hail providers: Curb, Arro and Myle. These hail a real yellow or green taxi rather than a private car. Under TLC’s e-hail rules you can be charged either the meter rate or an upfront flex fare, so check which you are agreeing to before you confirm.
Source: nyc.gov, Taxi Fare, retrieved 27 August 2026.
You left something in the cab
This is why a great many people go looking for a taxi phone number in the first place, so it is worth being exact about it.
Yellow cab, green cab, or any TLC-licensed car: contact 311 — dial 311 in the city, or 212-NEW-YORK. Have the date and time, where you got in and out, the vehicle licence number, how you paid and what the fare was. Most of that is on the receipt, which is the argument for always taking one. If you have the medallion number, TLC’s Taxi Lookup tool lets you contact the vehicle owner directly. Updates are typically available within two business days.
Uber or Lyft: go to the company, not 311. Both route you to the driver through a masked number in the app, and both charge a return fee once the driver confirms. Lyft’s window is 24 hours after the ride ends and its fee is $20. Uber charges a return fee too, but publishes no single US figure we could verify, so expect one rather than a specific amount.
One warning worth repeating from TLC directly: they will never ask for your full credit card number — only the last four digits. Anyone asking for more is not TLC.
Source: nyc.gov, Report Lost Property, retrieved 27 August 2026.
Complaining about a driver or a fare
Call 311 inside New York City, or 212-639-9675 from outside it. You can also file online through 311, and it offers help in more than 175 languages. TLC runs no general passenger hotline — 311 is the front door. The direct TLC numbers that do exist are for licensing (718-391-5501, option 2) and inspections (718-267-4559), neither of any use to a passenger.
Things you may have read that are not true
- Bolt does not operate in New York. Bolt runs in 850-plus cities and none of them are in the United States — its only North American ride-hailing is in Mexico. Its single US venture is a scooter brand in Washington DC.
- Addison Lee does not operate in New York. It bought Flyte Tyme in 2017, then sold its entire North American division to RMA Worldwide in February 2020. Addison Lee today describes itself as a London private-hire company and lists no US cities, so you cannot book one directly for a New York ride. One caveat worth knowing: Virgin Atlantic sells airport transfers through an Addison Lee partnership that does cover JFK, so the name still appears on a New York booking made that way.
- There is no general yellow-cab dispatch number. The only number that dispatches a yellow taxi is the accessible one above.
Numbers we deliberately did not print
Two phone numbers circulate widely for Uber and Lyft rider support. Neither appears on any page Uber or Lyft actually publish, so neither is here. That is the whole reason this page exists: the pages it replaces promised numbers and had none, and the fix for that is not to swap invented numbers for copied ones. For Uber, the working line is Call to Ride above. For Lyft, support runs through the app.
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