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There is no national timetable, and any page that prints one is guessing. Call windows follow each prison’s daily regime — so this page explains the shape of that regime, which is the thing that actually decides when your phone rings.
The shape of the day
On wings with shared phones, calls mostly happen when cells are unlocked for association — stretches of the late afternoon and early evening, plus daytime access around work and education. Two phones on a landing of eighty people is a queue, and the queue is why calls are short.
A growing share of prisons now have phones in cells, which moves calls out of the queue and into the evening — the single biggest improvement in when families hear a voice. Whether their prison has them is a question for them or the prison; both kinds still dial only approved numbers.[1]
Staff shortages, incidents and inspections shrink unlock times with no notice, and a restricted regime can hold for days. When that happens the calls compress or stop — it is the most common boring explanation for a silent week.
What no provider controls — us included — is any of the above. A company promising your calls will come at a certain time is promising you somebody else’s regime.
What you can do
The families who find this easiest stop expecting a daily rhythm and make the moments that do come count: keep the phone on you in the likely windows, agree a fallback (“if we get cut off, I’ll pick up again tomorrow”), and never spend the first minute of a call on why there wasn’t one yesterday.
And make answering cheap for them. The number they dial decides what the call costs out of their capped credit — the rates are less than half to a landline — so the one lever a family holds is the type of number waiting at your end.
If the calls have stopped altogether, start with why a number stops working — the causes, in order of likelihood.
Whenever their regime lets them reach a phone. On wings with shared phones that mostly means association periods — typically stretches of the late afternoon and early evening — plus whatever daytime access their work or education timetable allows. In prisons with in-cell phones the window is far wider, often into the evening. No national policy publishes a timetable; the regime at their prison is the answer, and it can change week to week.
Because access does. A queue for two wing phones at association, a changed work detail, a wing locked down for an afternoon — any of these turns a daily call into three days of nothing and then two calls in an hour. Bursts are the system's rhythm, not a signal something is wrong.
From a shared wing phone, no — access ends when association does. Where there is a phone in the cell the practical window runs later into the evening, though prisons still set limits. If you are being rung late at night from a number you do not recognise, that is a different question — be careful, and check the number against what you know.
Days of silence usually have a boring explanation: a regime restriction, a lost work detail, a transfer, or phone credit running out. Our guide to a number that has stopped working walks through the likely causes in order, and what you can check from outside.
Slightly, on the published HMPPS tariff: a call to a mobile drops from 5.50p to 3.60p a minute, and to a landline from 2.48p to 2.20p. The type of number dialled still matters far more than the day of the week.
Call windows themselves are set by each prison’s regime and are not published nationally — which is why this page describes the shape rather than printing a timetable. What is cited below is what national guidance does say.
[1]Staying in touch with someone in prison
GOV.UK — current guidance. Read 2026-08-23.
https://www.gov.uk/staying-in-touch-with-someone-in-prisonA landline number that rings the phone you already have, so whenever the window opens, the call is at the landline rate.