Does call forwarding work on prepaid in Australia?
Last checked 1 August 2026
Yes. You'll read a lot of the opposite, and it's the wrong diagnosis of a real problem.
Conditional call forwarding is what sends your unanswered calls to voicemail in the first place. If your prepaid service has voicemail, it already forwards. The reason a missed-call text-back “doesn't work on prepaid” is nearly always that voicemail got there first.
Check your own service in ten seconds
Don't take anyone's word for it, including ours. Dial *#61# and press call. Your network will tell you what your number currently does with calls you don't answer.
If it comes back with a setting — usually a number that unanswered calls go to — then your service does conditional forwarding. That number is almost always your voicemail. Which is the whole point of this page.
Why people think prepaid can’t do it
Someone on prepaid sets up a missed-call text-back, tests it, and the call goes to voicemail anyway. Reasonable conclusion: prepaid doesn't support forwarding. It gets written down, repeated, and ends up in a dozen articles.
But look at what actually happened. Voicemail answered. For voicemail to answer an unanswered call, the network has to divert that call to the voicemail platform — which is conditional call forwarding. It was working the entire time. It was just already pointed somewhere.
Voicemail and a missed-call text-back trigger on exactly the same conditions: you didn't answer, you were engaged, or you were out of range. They compete for the same slot, and only one of them gets the call. If voicemail is on, voicemail wins.
This is why “does my plan support it” is the wrong question. The question is what your unanswered calls are already pointed at.
What we actually see
We run a missed-call text-back service for Australian tradies, and plenty of them are on prepaid. In our experience the plan type has not been the blocker — carrier voicemail has. Turn voicemail off, set the forward, and prepaid behaves the same as postpaid.
To be straight with you: that's our own operating experience, not a published carrier policy, and we haven't tested every plan in the country. If your service turns out to be an exception we'd genuinely like to hear about it. But we'd ask you to run the *#61# check above before concluding your plan is the problem, because most of the time it isn't.
Turn voicemail off on your carrier
Every carrier does this differently — some it's a dial code, some it's buried in their app. We've written each one up separately against the carrier's own help page:
- Turn off voicemail on Boost — Telstra network
- Turn off voicemail on ALDI Mobile — Telstra network
- Turn off voicemail on amaysim — Optus network
- Turn off voicemail on felix — Vodafone network
- Turn off voicemail on Kogan — Vodafone network
- Turn off voicemail on Lebara — Vodafone network
Two things that catch people out
Call Catcher. On the Vodafone network — which includes felix, Lebara and Kogan — there's a second service that answers unanswered calls and texts you the number. Switching voicemail off doesn't switch it off, and on some brands the code you'll be told to dial for “voicemail off” turns Call Catcher on. Dial 121600 and follow the prompts to turn it off as well.
Your handset. Recent phones have started answering calls themselves — Google's Take a Message on newer Pixels, Apple's Call Screening on newer iPhones. They can turn up in a software update without you asking. If the carrier side is clean and calls still aren't ringing through, check the phone's own call settings.
If forwarding still won't stick after all that, ##004# clears no-answer diversions and gives you a clean slate to set it again.
Do it in the right order
Voicemail off first, then set your forward. Several of the codes that clear voicemail also clear every other diversion on the service — so running one after you've set your forward will wipe the forward too, and you'll be back where you started wondering why prepaid doesn't work.