About Phone Guide Hub
Phone Guide Hub is an independent reference site that helps low-income U.S. households navigate the federal Lifeline program and learn about the carriers that participated in the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP). We publish a state-by-state and carrier-by-carrier directory of free smartphone offers, eligibility rules, and the steps to enroll — written in plain English and updated whenever USAC publishes a new approved provider list.
Why we exist
About 7 million U.S. households use the federal Lifeline benefit today, but USAC and the FCC estimate that tens of millions more would qualify and don’t know it. The benefit is bureaucratic and the program names are confusing — Lifeline, ACP, the National Verifier, USAC. Carriers each market their offers slightly differently. State agencies layer on additional benefits in some places. The result is a maze that often discourages people who would benefit most.
We exist to flatten that maze. Every page on this site links you back to the carrier’s own enrollment page so you stay in control of your personal information. We never collect applications on this site. We never sell or share data.
Where our data comes from
The carrier directory and eligibility rules on this site are sourced from publicly published USAC and FCC program materials. The narrative carrier comparisons (network, monthly data, free-phone details) are editorial content compiled from carrier-published plan pages; the eligibility rules and income thresholds come from FCC program documentation and USAC's Consumer Eligibility page; and the historical ACP carrier roster comes from the FCC ACP page (fcc.gov/acp). We do not collect or republish any personal data from those sources.
Methodology: state-by-state USAC carrier rosters
Source. The complete carrier-roster table on each state page and the national totals on the carriers page are built directly from USAC's own "Lifeline Companies Near Me" open dataset (Socrata dataset id kjtb-4uf7, also mirrored at datahub.usac.org), published by the Universal Service Administrative Company under a Public Domain license and attributed to USAC per that license.
Pipeline. We queried the dataset's public REST API (no API key required) and paginated through every row — 746,607 rows nationwide at extraction time — using the dataset's own company, carrier_type, city, carrier_state, zip_code, county, customer_service, and website fields, exactly as published. For each of the 51 state/DC pages this site already had, we grouped USAC's raw rows by the exact (company name, service type, customer service number, website) values on file — no records were invented, merged across companies, or gap-filled — and computed real counts of the distinct counties, ZIP codes, and cities each carrier has on file in that state. Every rendered roster row corresponds to one or more identical raw USAC records; where a single company has more than one registered phone number or website for the same state (this does happen — regional divisions of the same company sometimes register separately), each is shown as its own row rather than being collapsed into one.
Date & cadence. Data was extracted 2026-07-25. USAC's own metadata for this dataset shows it was last refreshed 2026-07-24; USAC describes the dataset as refreshed periodically. We do not claim a fixed update schedule beyond USAC's own cadence — each roster table states the extraction date inline.
Fields rendered. Company name, service type (USAC's own "Mobile Service" / "Home Service" labels, shown verbatim — we do not invent expansions for any coded values), customer service phone number, website, and derived county/ZIP/city coverage counts. All of these are business-identity and service-area fields, not personal data.
Fields withheld. USAC's raw dataset includes a per-record Study Area Code (SAC) and individual city/ZIP-level rows; we withhold the raw SAC (an internal identifier we cannot verify a public definition for) and do not render one row per city/ZIP (some carriers have thousands of ZIP-level entries in a single state), publishing the aggregated per-carrier counts instead so each state's table stays a readable, honest roster rather than an unreadable wall of near-duplicate rows.
Corrections. If you believe a carrier is misrepresented, operating under a different name, or no longer active in a state, please tell us via the contact page — we will re-check against USAC's live dataset. USAC itself is the authoritative source of record for ETC status; carriers should contact USAC directly to correct their own listing.
Editorial independence
Phone Guide Hub may display advertising on its pages and may earn revenue from third-party advertising networks. Editorial decisions — which carriers to feature, how we describe their plans, and which we recommend — are made independently of any advertising arrangement. We do not accept payment in exchange for favorable coverage and we do not exclude carriers from our directory for refusing to advertise.
How to reach us
Editorial corrections, partnership inquiries, and accessibility feedback are all welcome via our contact page. For program-specific enrollment questions we always recommend calling the Lifeline Support Center at 1-800-234-9473 — they have access to your application record and can resolve issues in real time.