224 Area Code: Waukegan, Illinois

The 224 area code is an overlay covering the same north suburban Chicago footprint long served by the 847. Waukegan anchors the directory's records here. The city sits on Lake Michigan in northern Illinois near the Wisconsin border, organized around a working harbor, an older industrial waterfront, and a downtown that has been working through a slow reorientation from its mid-century manufacturing base. The 224 footprint runs through Lake County's broader cluster of cities and villages, taking in Highland Park, Evanston's northern edges, and the inland suburbs of the North Shore corridor.

Records linked to 224 numbers in the directory often include Aurora, Belleville, Chicago, and Cicero — Illinois cities outside the 224 footprint. The pattern reflects standard public-record dynamics, with phone numbers porting across Illinois and addresses linked across multiple cities through routine cross-referencing. The directory currently documents 308 distinct prefixes within 224 in detail, a working subset of the prefix population the code carries.

Waukegan's home values come in below the US median, an unusual reading for the broader North Shore corridor where surrounding suburbs carry sharply higher valuations. Median household income runs below the national figure, the city's median age sits a few years under the US reading, and population places Waukegan as one of the larger Lake County cities — sizable in absolute terms and substantial within the broader north suburban Chicago region. The 224 footprint as a whole spans a mix of older industrial cities and high-income North Shore suburbs.