The sixty-second answer
Almost always yes. On a hosted phone system your number is not tied to wires at a specific address, so moving across town or across the country generally keeps it. What does not move automatically is the civic address emergency services use to find you. Update that in writing before your first day.
Why this used to be a real question
For decades, a business number effectively belonged to a building. The number was tied to a physical pair of wires terminating at a specific address, and moving beyond a certain distance meant a new number, new signage, and telling every customer you had.
That link is gone for anything running on a hosted phone system. Numbering resources in Canada are administered under regulatory oversight, with blocks of numbers assigned to carriers in accordance with approved guidelines rather than nailed to premises [2]. The numbering administrator hands code blocks to carriers in exchange areas and is not even aware which individual number a carrier has given to which customer [1]. Your number is a record in a routing system, not a property of your building.
So the honest answer is yes, and the interesting part of this article is the small number of things that genuinely do change.
Case one: moving within the same city
The simplest case. The number keeps working, the area code is still right, and there is nothing to explain to customers. What still needs doing: update the registered civic address for emergency calls, update your billing and service address, and update your published address everywhere your phone number also appears, because those listings are usually the same listings.
Do the moving-day mechanics properly. Phones plugged in and confirmed working before you need them, a test call from outside on the first morning, and an agreed answer for what happens to calls during the hours when nobody is at either address. That last one is a routing decision, not a hardware decision, and the options are in after-hours and holiday call routing.
Case two: moving to a different area code
The number still works. Whether you should keep it as your only number is a marketing question, not a technical one.
Geographic area codes correspond to discrete geographic areas [1], and customers read them that way. If you have relocated permanently to a new region and expect to win new local customers there, an area code from three provinces away is a small, constant friction. But the number on your vehicles, your invoices and every listing you have built over ten years is also an asset, and throwing it away to look local is usually the wrong trade.
The normal answer is both. Keep the established number, add a local number in the new area code, and point them at the same greeting, the same hours and the same people so it makes no difference which one a customer dials. The pattern is described in getting a second business phone number, and the related judgement call about non-geographic numbers is in does my business need a toll-free number.
Case three: splitting into two locations
Plenty of moves are not moves at all. You are opening a second space and keeping the first, or half the team is going somewhere else. In that case the question is not whether the number survives, it is how calls behave across two addresses: who answers first, who covers when the other site is closed, and whether staff at one site can hand a call to a named person at the other without giving the customer a second number to dial.
That is a dial plan question rather than a moving question, and it is worked through in transferring calls between two locations and one dial plan for multiple sites and remote workers.
Case four: no office at all
If the move is out of premises entirely — a home office, a van, a fully remote team — the number still works, and it stops meaning a place. Calls ring the devices your people are logged into.
Two cautions here. First, each person's registered emergency address should be where that person actually is, not a head office that no longer exists. Second, if your people connect through a private network tunnel, be aware that tunnels can obscure the identity of the access network that knows the location, which is documented as significantly complicating emergency calling because the caller and the element routing the emergency call can end up on different continents [4]. That is a real operational issue for remote teams, not a theoretical one. The rest of the solo and small-team setup is in a phone system for a one-person business.
The one thing that does not follow you: your emergency address
This deserves its own heading because it is the thing people assume is handled and it is not.
Emergency calling is organised geographically. A call has to reach the answering point responsible for where you physically are, which means your location has to be established before an emergency call is placed rather than worked out during it — best-practice guidance for internet-based emergency calling states plainly that because emergency services are local to specific geographic regions, a caller must obtain their location prior to making emergency calls, and recommends that civic addresses be validated before being entered into the routing database [3].
Nothing about carrying a phone to a new address updates that record. If your registered address is the old office, that is where help goes, and you will not discover the mistake on an ordinary Tuesday. You will discover it on the worst day the business ever has.
So: update the civic address on every service and every extension that has one, get written confirmation of what is now on file, and test an emergency call in the manner your provider tells you is safe to test. Do it before your first working day in the new space, not during the first week.
What else quietly breaks on moving day
Analogue equipment. Alarm panels, elevator phones, fax machines, gate intercoms and payment terminals are attached to the building rather than to your phone system, and each has its own arrangements. Sort them separately and early; see analogue lines on a hosted phone system.
Your internet. The new building's connection is a different connection with different characteristics. Whether it can carry your calls well is worth confirming before you rely on it: bandwidth and quality of service requirements.
Your handsets. They usually move fine and reconnect on their own, but confirm rather than assume. See keeping your existing handsets.
Your published address. Every listing showing your old address is now wrong, and those listings usually show your phone number too. Fixing them together is more efficient than fixing them twice, and stale listings are a documented cause of the complaint covered in why customers say they cannot reach you.
Do not move and switch providers in the same week
Both a premises move and a provider change are records exercises with a cutover moment. Doing them together means that when something does not work, you cannot tell which change caused it, and you will spend a week with two parties each reasonably pointing at the other.
Do one, confirm it for a few days, then do the other. If they genuinely must be combined, move the number first while the old office is still open and staffed, so there is a working fallback. The timing side of that is covered in how long it takes to move a business number and the sequencing in the 30-day cutover runbook.
Where we sit
We run hosted phone systems for Canadian businesses, and a change of address is a routine event for us rather than a project. The number comes with you. What we insist on is the civic address being updated and confirmed in writing before you start working from the new space, because that is the part that has consequences nobody wants to discover the hard way.
If a provider tells you a move will be seamless, ask what they will actually test and when, since a performance claim has to be based on an adequate and proper test with the burden of proof on the person making it [6]. Ask for the all-in monthly figure at the new address too, including anything mandatory — an unattainable price caused by fixed obligatory charges is treated as a misleading representation under the same section [6]. Ours is published on the pricing page. Dependable telephone service is treated in Canadian law as infrastructure, which is the plain sense of the objectives in section 7 of the Telecommunications Act [5], and that should not stop being true because you changed buildings.