272 Area Code: Scranton, Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania's 272 area code is an overlay sharing geography with the long-running 570 across northeastern Pennsylvania. Scranton anchors the directory's records here. The city sits in the Lackawanna Valley in northeastern Pennsylvania, on a stretch of land that supported a major coal-mining and rail industry through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — the surrounding hills are still marked by the closed mine workings of that era. The local working economy has reshaped considerably alongside the contraction of the coal base, with healthcare, higher education (the University of Scranton, Marywood University, and Wilkes University in nearby Wilkes-Barre), and a substantial logistics presence anchoring much of the current profile. The 272 designation, part of the North American Numbering Plan, has been filling with allocations as the broader 570 region's number demand has continued to grow.

In records the directory has compiled for 272 numbers, other Pennsylvania cities — Allentown, Erie, Harrisburg, and Lancaster — appear regularly. None of those are inside the 272 footprint. The pattern reflects standard public-record dynamics across Pennsylvania. The directory currently documents 16 distinct prefixes within 272 in detail, an early-stage subset that should be read as a working slice of the prefix population the code will eventually carry.

Scranton's home values come in below the US median, with median household income running well below the national figure. The city's median age sits close to the US reading, and population is modest in absolute terms. The 272 footprint shares those demographics with 570 because both codes serve northeastern Pennsylvania in overlapping form.