If you follow a scanner, you need the codes in front of you, not buried in a browser tab you have to alt-tab back to every thirty seconds. This page gives you exactly that: a free, one-page printable PDF chart with the ten-codes you’ll actually hear, the response codes that set urgency, and the phonetic alphabet, all on a single sheet you can print, laminate, or pin next to your radio.
Download the Chart
Download the Police 10-Codes Printable Chart (PDF)
It’s a single letter-size page, built to print cleanly in black and white or color, with three sections: the most commonly used ten-codes, the Code 1–7 response scale, and the full NATO phonetic alphabet. No sign-up, no email gate — just the file.
What’s On the Chart
The chart is deliberately built around frequency, not completeness. Rather than cramming in all ninety-plus possible ten-codes — most of which you’ll hear a handful of times a year, if ever — it prioritises the codes that carry the bulk of real radio traffic:
- Status and communication — 10-4, 10-7, 10-8, 10-9, 10-20, ideal for following the basic rhythm of a shift.
- Checks and stops — 10-27, 10-28, 10-29, 10-38, the routine that precedes most traffic stops.
- Incidents — 10-31, 10-32, 10-50, 10-57, 10-80, the codes that flag what’s actually happening.
- Response codes — Code 1 through Code 7, the separate family that tells you how urgently officers are responding, from routine to full emergency.
- The phonetic alphabet — Alfa through Zulu, the one part of this whole system that’s genuinely standardised worldwide.
Two codes on the chart are marked with an asterisk, and they’re worth reading before you print anything: 10-13 and 10-99. Both are known to mean sharply different things depending on the agency — 10-13 is a routine weather request in the standard reference list but the NYPD’s call for an officer in danger, and 10-99 shifts between “wanted or stolen,” an emergency, and a one-officer acknowledgment in Chicago. The chart flags both so you don’t get caught assuming a fixed meaning that doesn’t hold everywhere.
Why a One-Page Chart Instead of the Full List
If you want the complete 10-0 through 10-99 reference, with every known variation and every suffix, that lives on our full list of police 10-codes page — it’s the exhaustive version, built for lookup rather than printing on your wall.
This chart is different on purpose. A printable reference only works if it’s short enough to actually glance at mid-transmission, which means the real skill isn’t listing every code that exists — it’s picking the dozen or two that do almost all the work. That’s also the philosophy behind our 50 most common police codes guide, which explains, in more depth than a chart allows, why those particular codes come up so often and how they cluster by function.
A Word on Accuracy Before You Print
The single most important thing to know about any ten-code chart — this one included — is that there is no national code book. Roughly 18,000 separate law enforcement agencies in the United States each have real independence over how they communicate, and meanings drift between them. What’s on this chart is the widely accepted baseline meaning for each code, the version you’ll hear most often across general APCO-style systems. It is not a guarantee of what your specific local department uses.
If you’re following a particular agency closely — a city PD, a county sheriff, a state patrol — it’s worth checking whether that department publishes its own code sheet, because a local reference always beats a general one. Some regions don’t lean on ten-codes at all: much of Florida and the Southeast communicates primarily through signals rather than ten-codes, and California layers ten-codes together with eleven-codes, response codes, and spoken penal-code numbers on the same channel. Our guides to Florida’s signal system and how 10-codes, 11-codes, and penal codes differ cover those variations if your local area is one of them.
How to Use the Chart
A few practical tips once you’ve printed it out. Keep it somewhere you can glance at without looking away from the radio for more than a second or two — that’s the whole point of trimming the list down to one page. If a code you hear doesn’t match anything on the chart, don’t assume it’s wrong; it may simply belong to a local system this baseline chart doesn’t cover, in which case a quick search against your specific agency will usually clear it up. And if you’re new to this, don’t try to absorb the whole page at once — most people find the status codes (10-4, 10-7, 10-8, 10-20) and the response codes (Code 3, Code 4) click first, since they’re the ones repeated constantly, with the rest filling in naturally as you keep listening.
Using Police Code to Explore Further
Police Code is a global police code explorer built for exactly what this chart can’t do on its own: showing you what a code means at a specific agency, in a specific place, rather than a single generalised guess. Once you’ve got the basics down from the printable chart, you can search the full database to check a code against the department you’re actually listening to, compare ten-codes against signals and penal codes, or look up how a completely different country handles the same job. It’s free to browse and built for scanner listeners, journalists, writers, and anyone who wants their reference chart backed by something more thorough when a code doesn’t quite add up.