Lusha Phone Numbers Not Working? Validate the Export Before You Call

What a Lusha number costs you

From Lusha's pricing page, read on 6 November 2026:

• Reveal a verified email address: 1 credit.
• Reveal a phone number: 5 credits.
• Free plan: up to 40 credits a month.
• Monthly plans: unused credits roll over while you're subscribed, up to twice the plan's credit limit.
• Annual plans: all credits up front; unused credits reset at the end of the annual cycle.

So 40 free credits buy 8 phone numbers, or 40 emails. A list of 500 phone reveals uses 2,500 credits. At that price, a number lost to a formatting mistake is money thrown away, and a number that was never dialable is worth knowing about before your reps spend time on it.

Why Lusha numbers "don't work"

The cause is usually one of these:

1. Format damage. Excel drops leading zeros (07911… becomes 7911…) and turns long numbers into scientific notation. A UK mobile that was right in Lusha arrives broken in your dialer.
2. Missing country code. A number written in national format gets read as a US number by the dialer and fails.
3. Switchboard, not direct line. A company number reaches reception.
4. Changed since recorded. People change jobs and carriers; numbers get ported, disconnected and reassigned.
5. Never valid. Typos and impossible ranges in the source data.

Validation fixes 1 and 2, flags 3 if the type tells you, removes 5, and with a carrier lookup can show that a number has been ported (4). It can't tell you whether the person still answers.

Step by step

1. Export without opening in Excel

Export your Lusha contacts to CSV and upload the file as downloaded. If you must open it, use Excel's import wizard and set the phone columns to Text first. Details: validate phone numbers in Excel.

2. Choose one phone column

If the export has more than one number per contact (a direct line and a mobile, say), decide which you'll dial and keep it in one column. Mobile first for person-level calls, direct line second, company number only for account-level outreach. SimpleVerifier finds common headers like phone, mobile, direct phone and mobile phone automatically; with several, it uses the one whose cells look most like phone numbers, so a single clear column gives the most predictable result.

3. Validate every number

Upload to the bulk phone number validator or the verify page. Every row gets four columns:

Column	Example	What it tells you
phone_status	valid / invalid / empty	Whether the number can exist in its country
phone_e164	+447911123456	The format dialers and SMS tools expect
phone_country	GB	Which numbering plan it belongs to
phone_type	mobile / fixed line / toll-free	The type its range was allocated for

Numbers without a + are read as US numbers, so if your list includes prospects outside North America, make sure country codes are present. The add or remove country code and phone number country lookup tools help.

4. Live lookups for North American numbers

In the US and Canada, mobile and landline numbers share area codes, so phone_type comes back "mobile or landline" for most of them. If you'll text, or need to treat mobiles differently for compliance, you need the carrier-reported line type. A live carrier lookup returns the current carrier and mobile, landline or VoIP, including after a number has been ported. See phone carrier lookup and TCPA: mobile vs landline.

Check one number first with the landline or mobile checker.

5. Dedupe, then load

Dedupe after formatting, never before; two spellings of the same number only match once both are in E.164. Use remove duplicate phone numbers, then import only the valid rows.

Clean Lusha emails in the same upload

Lusha labels its emails verified at the time it recorded them. If your export has an email column, SimpleVerifier runs a fresh live SMTP mailbox check on every address in the same pass. Catch-all addresses are reported risky, never valid, and graded higher, medium or lower likelihood (how grading works). More in clean a Lusha or Seamless export, or try the free Lusha export to email list tool.

What it costs on SimpleVerifier

• Pro, $39 a month: phone format checks on every row, plus Unlimited email verification*, the email finder, an API and an MCP server.
• Pro + Phone, $49.99 a month: 5,000 live carrier lookups a month, with carrier and line type (mobile, landline or VoIP), US numbers included. Failed lookups don't count.
• Starter, $9 a month: 2,500 emails a month, email only.
• Free: 100 checks with a Google sign-in.

*Fair use: the first 100,000 checks a month at full speed, then slower, never cut off. Phone lookups and API calls are not part of Unlimited.

See pricing for the full plans.

What no validator can do

Validation answers "can this number connect, and what kind of line is it?" It can't answer "is this still the right person?" or "may I call them?" Treat it as the filter that stops your reps wasting dials on numbers that were never going to work, and let call outcomes handle the rest. Feed wrong-person results back to your CRM so you don't reveal or dial them again.

More reading: Lusha alternatives, phone number validation for cold calling, validate Apollo phone numbers, bulk phone number validation.