518 Area Code: Albany, New York

The 518 area code covers New York's Capital Region and the surrounding upstate counties, with Albany — the state capital — as the primary city. Albany sits along the Hudson River roughly 150 miles north of New York City, organized around the New York State Capitol, the Empire State Plaza (a substantial cluster of state-government buildings), and the surrounding downtown core. The local working economy reflects state government, healthcare, several university campuses (the SUNY system's flagship at Albany among them), and a long-running role as the commercial and political center for upstate New York. The 518 footprint extends through Schenectady, Troy, Saratoga Springs, the Adirondack Park's southern reaches, and the surrounding upstate counties.

In records the directory has compiled for 518 numbers, other New York cities — Binghamton, Brentwood, Buffalo, and Hempstead — recur frequently. None of those are inside the 518 footprint. The pattern reflects standard public-record dynamics, with phone numbers porting across New York and addresses linked across multiple cities. The directory currently documents 593 distinct prefixes within 518 in detail, a working subset of the prefix population the code carries.

Albany's home values come in close to the US median, with median household income running below the national figure. The city's median age sits well under the US reading, in the low thirties, shaped by the substantial student population at the surrounding higher-education campuses. Population places Albany among the smaller state-capital cities by total headcount but substantial enough to anchor a regional economy organized around government, healthcare, and education.