573 Area Code: Columbia, Missouri

Central, eastern, and southeastern Missouri outside the immediate St. Louis metro is served by the 573 area code, with Columbia as the primary city in the directory's records. Columbia sits midway between Kansas City and St. Louis along I-70, organized around the University of Missouri's main campus — the oldest public university west of the Mississippi — and a substantial healthcare sector built around the university hospital system. The 573 footprint extends through Jefferson City (the state capital), Cape Girardeau, the Lake of the Ozarks region, and the rural counties of southeastern Missouri.

In records the directory has compiled for 573 numbers, other Missouri cities — Kansas City, O'Fallon, Sedalia, and Springfield — recur frequently. None of those are inside the 573 footprint. The pattern reflects standard public-record dynamics, with phone numbers porting across Missouri and addresses linked across multiple cities. The directory currently documents 507 distinct prefixes within 573 in detail, a working subset of the prefix population the code carries.

Columbia's median age sits well under the US figure, at the high twenties, a pattern shaped heavily by the substantial student population at the University of Missouri. Median household income runs below the national reading, home values come in below the US median, and population places Columbia as one of the larger cities in Missouri — substantial enough to anchor a regional economy organized around the university, the medical center, and a growing technology and insurance sector.