How do you configure Zoom Phone for Kari's Law and RAY BAUM's Act?

By Michael Obraitis, Managing Partner, and Michael Dale, CEO · Published August 17, 2026 · Last reviewed August 2026 · ADAM Pulse Knowledge Base · Emergency Calling Series

Short answer

Emergency calling in Zoom Phone is not a setting. It is a build, and the order matters because several steps are hard prerequisites for the ones after them.

The sequence: inventory sites, devices, users and network. Create and validate emergency addresses. Configure emergency call routing. Configure internal notifications and the safety response team. Enable nomadic emergency services, per site. Define locations and sublocations. Map network signals to those locations. Handle remote and hybrid users. Review desk phones and common area phones. Resolve the BYOC and ELIN question. Test using supported procedures. Monitor and maintain.

Steps 2 and 3 must be complete before step 5 — Zoom requires emergency addresses and emergency calling to be configured before nomadic emergency services can be enabled. Step 10 can invalidate design decisions from steps 5 through 7, so read it before you build, not after.

Zoom supplies the capability. Your organization owns the design, the data and the maintenance.

Before you start: prerequisites

Zoom documents these requirements for nomadic emergency services.

Note what is missing from that list. The Zoom mobile app does not use nomadic emergency services at all — it always uses the phone's native carrier for emergency calls. Mobile is outside this build and needs to be handled in user training instead.

Step 1: Inventory before you touch the portal

Emergency calling is a location problem wearing a telephony costume. Configuration that does not mirror the physical and network environment will be wrong on day one and get worse.

Build a single structured inventory. For large estates this becomes the source of truth that makes audits possible.

That last column is the one people skip and the reason configurations rot.

Step 2: Emergency addresses

Emergency addresses are the foundation. Zoom provides the emergency address to first responders when an emergency number is dialed, so every downstream feature is only as good as this data.

Use Address Line 2 for the detail that makes an address dispatchable: Building B, 4th Floor, Suite 420, East Wing, Warehouse 2. Keep these short and plain. The field is length-limited, and more importantly a responder reading it under pressure needs a landmark, not a description.

The test for whether an address is good enough is not whether it is correct. It is: if responders arrive at this address, can they find the caller? A storefront passes on street address alone. A hospital, hotel, high-rise, campus or warehouse complex does not.

Remember that the binding standard is a validated street address plus whatever detail is necessary to identify the caller's location. Correctly formatted and wrong does not satisfy it.

Step 3: Emergency call routing

Zoom Phone can route emergency calls to a Public Safety Answering Point, to an internal safety response team, or through supported combinations of the two, depending on configuration and geography. For US and Canadian numbers, Zoom supports PSAP routing.

The governing principle: internal processes must not become a barrier to reaching public emergency services. Whether to insert an internal team ahead of the PSAP is an organizational risk decision, not a default. If you do it, understand Zoom's routing path and its maximum holding behavior before you enable it in production.

Also confirm here that direct 911 dialing works with no outside-line prefix. That is the Kari's Law requirement and it is the one thing on this page that has no acceptable workaround.

Step 4: Internal notifications and the safety response team

In Zoom Phone, an internal safety response team is implemented as a call queue designated to handle emergency calls. Because an emergency call can arrive at any hour, the queue's availability and overflow behavior are design decisions rather than defaults — work out what happens to a 911 call that nobody in the queue answers before you put the queue in the path.

Zoom also supports emergency notifications to configured recipients, who "will receive alerts and warnings regarding locations and emergency addresses."

Recipient lists are a maintenance item, not a setup item. Every departure and role change is a chance for the notification to go to a mailbox nobody reads.

Step 5: Enable nomadic emergency services

Nomadic emergency services let Zoom detect a user's location from network data rather than relying on one static address per user.

Two things to know about enabling it.

It is per site. Zoom's documentation is explicit: "The nomadic emergency services feature must be turned on for a given site before you can begin to manage the locations." A multi-site organization has a multi-site configuration task, not one switch.

Roll it out to a subset first. Zoom supports testing on a subset of phone users to build up location data before broad enablement. For any estate with more than one building, use this. Location data quality is something you discover, not something you design correctly the first time.

Step 6: Locations and sublocations

A location is a physical area tied to an emergency address and to network information. Sublocations sit beneath a parent location and carry the granular detail. A Zoom Phone site such as Chicago contains a location — Main Office, 200 W Monroe — which in turn contains a sublocation such as 3rd Floor, West.

You do not need a sublocation for every room. The right granularity is whatever is necessary to adequately identify the caller's location, which is an environment question: a twelve-person suite needs less than a 400-bed hospital.

Step 7: Map network signals to locations

Zoom works down a hierarchy of signals to decide which emergency address applies to a call. Understanding the precision of each one tells you which to invest in.

The practical read: if a whole building shares one public IP, that signal identifies the building and nothing more. Floor-level accuracy comes from BSSID or switch port, and both of those are only as accurate as the network documentation behind them. Deciding to use switch-port mapping is deciding to keep a cabling record current forever.

Step 8: Remote and hybrid users

Zoom supports personal emergency addresses, where a user associates their own location with an emergency address and Zoom saves the network signature so it recognizes the location later. When a desktop user is somewhere undefined, Zoom can prompt them to add or verify an address.

The configuration steps are straightforward. The hard parts are policy questions — what you require of employees, what happens when they ignore the prompt, what address applies to a hotel room — and those are covered in [What counts as a dispatchable location for remote and hybrid workers?](/articles/remote-worker-e911-dispatchable-location)

One thing to settle here: leaving remote staff on the office default address means an emergency call may report a building hundreds of miles from the caller. Whatever your policy is, it should be a decision rather than a leftover.

Step 9: Desk phones and common area phones

Desk phones need their site, emergency address, location or sublocation, network detection and device assignment confirmed against where the phone physically sits.

Common area phones need more attention, not less, because they have no assigned user to correct a bad address. They live in lobbies, hallways, warehouses, conference rooms, security desks and near elevators — exactly the places responders are sent.

Zoom's documented fallback for these devices in the US and Canada: the phone reports its configured device address, or the default site address if no device address is configured. That makes device-level address accuracy the whole game for shared phones.

Step 10: The BYOC and ELIN decision

This is the step most likely to invalidate the rest of your build, which is why it should be settled early even though it appears late in the sequence.

An Emergency Response Location (ERL) is a defined location. An Emergency Location Identification Number (ELIN) is a phone number associated with that location, which the carrier uses to look up the emergency address.

When ELINs are required, per Zoom:

The BYOC trap. When a BYOC carrier handles the emergency call, the address reported to the PSAP comes from the BYOC carrier's records. Zoom may still detect a nomadic address for logging or for the internal safety response team, but it cannot report that detected address to the PSAP the way it does when Zoom is the emergency carrier.

Read that twice if you are running BYOC. It means you can build a perfect nomadic location model in steps 5 through 7 and still deliver a static carrier-of-record address to the PSAP.

Zoom's own position is stronger than a preference: it does not recommend BYOC carriers for emergency calling in the US and Canada, and advises BYOC customers to enable the option to use Zoom as their emergency call carrier for US and Canadian numbers. If you go the other way, your carrier must update the public address of record for every number used as an ELIN to match the configured emergency address.

Step 11: Test, without calling 911 for fun

Testing is mandatory. Casually placing live 911 calls to experiment is not testing, it is a nuisance call to a PSAP.

Zoom documents a controlled procedure for validating ERL and ELIN configuration:

1. Create a test site with nomadic emergency services configured.
2. Set emergency call handling to route to an internal safety response team first, then to the PSAP after the maximum holding time.
3. Place an emergency call and answer it from the safety team queue before the timeout expires, so it never reaches the PSAP.
4. Check the call logs and confirm the outbound caller ID number matches the assigned ELIN.

What to cover in a full test pass: direct 911 dialing, site detection, location and sublocation detection, desk phones, common area phones, remote users, undefined locations, internal notifications, safety response routing, callback behavior, BYOC routing, ELIN configuration, and multi-site behavior.

Record each test with the date, site, device, user, detected location, expected address, actual result and owner. That log is the difference between "we configured it" and "we can show it works."

Step 12: Monitor and maintain

Zoom provides a nomadic emergency services dashboard that surfaces metrics such as users who are not inside any defined detection location. That report is your early warning: it tells you where the model has drifted before an emergency does.

Re-check emergency calling whenever any of these happen:

• A site opens, closes, moves floors or is renovated
• Network architecture changes, switches are replaced, or access points are swapped
• Phones are physically moved, or common area phones are added
• A BYOC carrier is added or changed
• Remote work expands, or another company is acquired
• Security or facilities staff change

Every one of those is a physical or network event, not a telephony event, which is why the owner of this configuration cannot be an isolated phone administrator.

Who owns what

IT knows the network. Facilities knows the building. Emergency location accuracy needs both, and the failure mode is that neither is told when the other changes something.

Where these builds go wrong

1. Treating the site default address as adequate for every caller.
2. Ignoring floors and suites in buildings that need them.
3. Enabling nomadic emergency services but never mapping network signals to locations.
4. Leaving remote users on an office address.
5. Forgetting common area phones entirely.
6. Assuming mobile behaves like desktop. It does not.
7. Not understanding that BYOC changes what the PSAP receives.
8. Notification recipients who left the company.
9. Never retesting after a network change.
10. Treating go-live as the end of the project.

Deployment checklist

Governance — assign an owner; complete legal or compliance review; document scope.

Direct dialing — verify 911 dials directly; remove any prefix dependency.

Addresses — create and validate; add dispatchable detail; confirm per site.

Routing — configure PSAP routing; review callback behavior; decide the emergency carrier for BYOC.

Internal response — define recipients; configure email notifications; configure the safety response team if used; test the human process, not just the routing.

Nomadic services — enable per site; define locations and sublocations; map network signals; enable personal locations.

Devices — desk phones, common area phones, shared devices.

Remote work — personal address procedure; user training on undefined-location prompts; location permission settings.

Testing — documented plan; Zoom-supported procedures; record, correct, retest.

Operations — dashboard review cadence; undefined-location follow-up; emergency calling added to change management; periodic audit.

Frequently asked questions

Related articles

• Zoom + Microsoft Teams: Complete Integration Guide — name the Teams architecture first; emergency calling ownership follows the dialer, not the other way around.
• Does Kari's Law apply to my phone system? — what the rules require and whether they apply to you.
• What counts as a dispatchable location for remote and hybrid workers? — the policy and edge cases this build hands off.
• How long does Zoom Phone number porting take? — emergency calling belongs in the migration plan, not after it.
• Zoom topic hub — every live Zoom Phone, E911 and Zoom administration article in one place.

References

Primary sources first. The CFR is the rule; the FCC's web pages are summaries of it.

1. 47 CFR § 9.16 — MLTS direct dialing, notification and dispatchable location obligations
2. FCC — Multi-line Telephone Systems: Kari's Law and RAY BAUM's Act 911 requirements
3. Zoom — Deploying a nomadic emergency services solution
4. Zoom — Setting up nomadic emergency services (KB0062169)
5. Zoom — Setting up emergency response locations, ERL and ELIN (KB0064642)

ADAM Pulse deploys and audits Zoom Phone nomadic emergency services: site mapping, network signals, BYOC and ELIN review, and a test plan that is not a live 911 call.