How to Get an EIN From Outside the US by Phone: The SS-4 Call, Step by Step

Yes — if you're outside the United States without an SSN or ITIN, you get your EIN by calling the IRS at +1 267-941-1099, Monday to Friday, 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. US Eastern time (hours verified on irs.gov, August 2026). The line is not toll-free, an operator walks you through Form SS-4 question by question, and the EIN is issued during the call — you hang up with the number that unlocks your US bank account, Stripe, and tax filings.

This is the step every non-US founder of a Delaware or Wyoming LLC hits: the IRS's online EIN tool requires the responsible party to have an SSN or ITIN and the business to be US-based, so foreign owners are locked out of it by design. The phone route is the official fast path — and it's genuinely fast if you show up prepared. Below: exactly who qualifies, what the operator asks (the full SS-4, line by line), when to call from your time zone, what it costs, and the traps that force people to call twice.

Can You Get an EIN by Phone From Outside the US?

Yes. The IRS runs a dedicated line for international EIN applicants: +1 267-941-1099, staffed Monday through Friday, 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. Eastern time. It's a normal Pennsylvania geographic number, dialable from any country — unlike the domestic business line (800-829-4933) that most articles quote, which is toll-free and therefore cannot be reached from outside the US at all. Phone is also the only method where the EIN exists before the conversation ends; fax takes about four business days and mail takes weeks.

Two rules from the SS-4 instructions worth knowing before you dial. First, the person making the call must be authorized to receive the EIN and answer questions about Form SS-4 — normally the owner, or a designee named in the form's Third-Party Designee section. Second, the IRS issues one EIN per responsible party per day, whatever the method — relevant if you're forming more than one entity.

Who Qualifies for the Phone Route?

The phone line is reserved for true international applicants. The SS-4 instructions define it precisely: you may apply by phone if you have no legal residence, principal place of business, or principal office or agency in the United States or US territories. That covers the typical case exactly — a founder in, say, Pakistan, Brazil, or Germany who formed a Delaware or Wyoming LLC through a formation service and runs it from home.

If you do live in the US or run the business from a US location, you're expected to use the online tool, fax, or mail instead — and if your responsible party has an SSN or ITIN plus a US principal place of business, the online tool issues an EIN in minutes and this whole guide is unnecessary. The phone route exists precisely for everyone the online tool turns away.

What Happens on the Call — Form SS-4, Question by Question

The call is a structured interview: the operator reads through Form SS-4 and records your answers. Fill the form out completely before dialing — the IRS expects answers ready, and fumbling one is how a ten-minute interview becomes a redial. Download the current SS-4 from irs.gov and work through it with this map (field names from the December 2025 revision of the form's instructions):

When the operator finishes, they assign the EIN on the spot. The instructions tell phone applicants to write the number in the upper-right corner of your SS-4, sign and date it, and keep that copy — banks and payment processors will accept it while you wait for the CP 575 confirmation letter to reach your foreign mailing address, which can take several weeks. Budget 30–60 minutes for the whole call: the interview itself is typically 15–20 minutes, and the rest is hold time, which varies from minutes to painful depending on the day.

When to Call: The Time-Zone Table

The 6 a.m.–11 p.m. Eastern window is generous, but hold times aren't flat across it. IRS phone lines are busiest on Mondays and Tuesdays; midweek, close to the 6 a.m. ET opening, is consistently the shortest queue. Here's the opening bell translated into founder time zones (August 2026, US Eastern = EDT, UTC−4):

From early November to early March, US Eastern shifts to UTC−5 and every time above moves one hour later for you — and the US changes its clocks on different dates than the UK and EU, so double-check during late March and late October. For founders in Asia and Australia the evening slot is the practical one; it maps to mid-morning Eastern, which is busier than the open but far better than nothing.

What the Call Costs

The EIN itself is free — the IRS charges nothing, ever (more on that below). Your only cost is the phone call, and because +1 267-941-1099 is not toll-free, you pay your provider's rate to a US number for the full duration, hold included. From the BubblyPhone browser dialer the live US rate is $0.025 per minute — a typical 30-minute EIN call costs about $0.75, and even a full hour with a long hold is $1.50. The same hour on mobile roaming or a local carrier's international rate commonly runs $30–$180, and a hotel phone considerably more.

A browser call has a second advantage for this specific errand: you're at your computer, with the SS-4 PDF and your formation documents on screen while you talk. No app to install, and the per-minute price is shown before you dial (full US rate on the rates page).

Phone vs Fax vs Mail vs Online

Numbers, addresses and timeframes verified on irs.gov in August 2026 (the EIN page, the how-to-apply pages, and the Form SS-4 instructions). Fax is the sensible fallback if you can't face the queue — online fax services give you a receiving number for the return fax. Mail from abroad is a last resort.

Why You'll Also Need a US Phone Number

The EIN call is the first of a series. What foreign founders discover next: much of the US financial system assumes it can reach you on a US number. Banks and fintechs make verification calls and often won't accept a foreign number in the application form; Stripe and payment processors phone-verify accounts and flag mismatched countries; the IRS's own callback option — offered when its queues are long — only calls US numbers. A +92 or +55 mobile quietly fails all of these.

That's the honest reason we'll point you at our own product here: a dedicated US phone number on BubblyPhone costs $3 setup plus $3/month, receives calls and texts in your browser wherever you are, and gives your LLC a real US number to put on bank forms, Stripe, and IRS correspondence — one you can actually answer from Karachi or São Paulo. If you're running regular US-facing operations, the business international calling setup covers the outbound side too. It's not required to get your EIN; it becomes useful roughly one week later. If nobody's awake to answer it during US business hours, an AI receptionist like Dial Milo can pick up and take the message instead.

What to Watch Out For

• Calling the wrong number. 800-829-4933 is the IRS's domestic business line — toll-free, so it won't even connect from abroad. The international EIN line is +1 267-941-1099, and general international tax questions go to +1 267-941-1000 (our guide to calling the IRS from abroad covers that line).
• An incomplete SS-4. The interview follows the form. Blank lines you planned to “figure out live” — the county, the closing month, the exact legal name — are what stall calls.
• Naming your formation agent as responsible party. The responsible party is the person who ultimately owns or controls the entity — you, not the agent who filed your paperwork. And no SSN/ITIN is fine: “foreign” on line 7b is the documented answer.
• Never pay for the EIN itself. The IRS's own words: “You never have to pay a fee for an EIN.” Formation services legitimately charge to prepare and file the SS-4 for you — that's a service fee, not an IRS fee — but any site selling “official EIN registration” is marking up a free government process.
• The Form 5472 obligation. One heads-up that saves foreign owners real money: a US single-member LLC wholly owned by a foreign person generally must file Form 5472 (attached to a pro forma Form 1120) every year, even with zero US income — and the penalties for missing it are severe. That's exactly why line 9a gets the “Foreign-owned U.S. disregarded entity — Form 5472” label. This article isn't tax advice; put a tax professional who knows foreign-owned LLCs on your list right after the bank account.

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