There is no national timetable for prison phone calls. What there is, in England and Wales, is a minimum: PSI 49/2011 says prisoners must be given access to the PIN phone during association and at other reasonable times, and that the time available "must not normally be less than two hours each day". The hours themselves are set by each prison.
That single sentence explains most of the confusion, and most of the waiting.
What the rule says, and what it does not
The published position has three parts, and separating them answers most of the question. Prisoners get access to the phones during association — the part of the regime when people are unlocked and out of their cells — and at other times where that is reasonably practicable, depending on how the establishment runs. The time available should normally be at least two hours a day. And the phones themselves are on a schedule: PSI 49/2011 says they can be set to come on and off according to the prison's working day, with different schedules on different days, or left switched on all the time, and that those schedules are applied centrally within each establishment. What the rule does not do is fix a clock. No policy says calls happen between particular hours, because the hours follow the regime, and regimes differ by prison, by wing, by category and by day.
That is why nobody at the prison can give you a time either. The two-hour figure is a floor for access, not a promise of a slot.
Why the answer is different in every prison
If you compare notes with someone whose partner is elsewhere and get a completely different picture, neither of you is wrong.
The biggest single variable now is whether there are phones in cells. Where in-cell telephony has been installed, calls are no longer tied to association at all — someone can ring in the evening from their own cell, within whatever schedule the prison has set. Where calls still happen on a landing phone, the two-hour minimum is competing with meals, work, education, exercise and everyone else on the wing who wants the handset.
On top of that sit the ordinary disruptions: restricted regimes when the prison is short-staffed, lockdowns, incidents, and the simple fact that a fixed number of phones has to serve a whole landing. None of that appears in a policy document, and all of it decides whether a call happens at seven o'clock or not at all.
The practical consequence is that the only reliable timetable is the one the person in prison tells you. It is worth asking early — what times can you get to a phone, and which days are worst — because it converts an evening of waiting into a window.
You cannot ring in, and that is the rule not a fault
This is the part that surprises people most, and it is unambiguous. The PIN phone system does not accept incoming calls. PSI 49/2011 states it directly, and adds that any arrangement to allow an incoming call must involve an official telephone — the sort of thing arranged through staff in genuinely urgent circumstances, not something you can do from your kitchen.
So there is no number to ring when a call does not come, no way to leave a message on the system itself, and no way to reach someone quickly because something has happened at home. If there is an emergency, the route is the prison's switchboard and its family liaison arrangements, not the phone your partner rings you on.
If the window is short, the rate matters more than the clock does.
When the call does not come
Silence is rarely what it feels like. There are four ordinary explanations, and they cover most evenings.
The credit ran out. Calls are charged per minute from the prisoner's own credit — since April 2025, 5.5p a minute to a mobile and 2.48p to a landline on weekdays in England and Wales, on figures the Ministry of Justice released to Inside Time. Credit is not topped up by you directly; money goes to their private cash account and they have to transfer it themselves.
The phone access period ended. The schedule closed, or association was cut short.
Somebody else had the phone. On a landing with one working handset and forty people, this is routine.
The number is not on the list yet. New arrivals cannot call anyone until their contact list has been checked by security — GOV.UK says that happens on arrival and "may take a few days". A number that has never worked is a different problem from a number that stopped working.
There is a fifth possibility, rarer but worth naming: a number can be restricted. That is a formal decision under the prison rules rather than a scheduling problem, it comes with an obligation to give reasons, and it expires after three months unless it is renewed. If a number worked for weeks and then stopped dead while others still work, that is the thing to ask about.
What a transfer does to the timetable
Moves between prisons are common, and they reset the part of this that is local.
The account and the approved list travel with the person. The regime does not. A move can change the hours the phones are on, whether there is a handset in the cell, how long the queue is, and how quickly anything gets sorted out. It is normal for a settled routine to disappear for a week or two after a transfer and then re-form around different hours.
The first call after a move is often the one that tells you what the new pattern will be — worth asking about explicitly rather than waiting to work it out over a fortnight.
Halving the per-minute rate is the one lever that makes a short window go further.
Building a routine that survives the regime
Because the hours are local and changeable, the only thing that reliably helps is information from the inside.
Ask which days are worst and which are easiest; in most prisons there is a clear difference between a working weekday and a weekend or bank holiday. Ask whether calls are made from a cell or a landing phone, since that decides whether evenings are possible at all. And agree what silence means in advance — that a missed call is assumed to be credit, queue or regime, not something wrong — because that single agreement removes most of the anxiety from an evening when the phone does not ring.
It is also worth knowing that a call being cut short is usually about money rather than time. Where the credit runs out mid-conversation there is no warning tone; the line simply ends.
How many calls are they allowed?
There is no set number of calls in policy. What policy limits is the list: under PSI 49/2011, a prisoner on a call-enabling regime can hold up to 20 social numbers, plus separate legal and confidential-access numbers. Beyond that, the practical limits are money and access — how much credit there is, and how much time at the phone the regime allows.
That is why "how many calls a week are they allowed" usually turns out to be the wrong question. The binding constraint is almost always credit.
Frequently asked questions
The questions that come up most often about phone times.
What time do prisoners get to use the phone?
It depends on the prison. Policy requires access during association and normally no less than two hours a day, but each establishment sets its own schedule around its working day.
Can prisoners call at night?
Where phones are in cells, calls in the evening are common within the prison's schedule. Where calls are made on landing phones, they are limited to unlock periods. Neither is guaranteed.
Can I call them instead?
No. The prison phone system does not accept incoming calls. Urgent messages go through the prison's switchboard.
Do phone times change at weekends?
They can. Policy allows different schedules on different days, and weekend regimes are often shorter than weekday ones.
Phone times are one of the few things in a sentence that nobody outside can control, and one of the easiest to misread from a quiet living room. Knowing that the rule is a floor and not a timetable makes the waiting slightly less bewildering.
If the calls you do get are ending sooner than you would like, the questions families ask first covers what a landline number changes about the cost, and how it works explains the rest. The Prisoners' Families Helpline, run by the charity Pact, is free and independent if you need to talk to somebody about a specific prison.
If longer calls in the same window would help, the plans are here.