UPDATE! Yes, carriers and Google are making it harder to make this combination work by trying to integrate you into your carrier’s visual voicemail platform. In order to make this work a few things needed to happen. See New Instructions below.
If you’re like me, you spent hours searching the internet for the answer to how to setup Google Voice voicemail for your T-Mobile phone. That search though likely yielded references to incorrect information, outdated instructions (including references to Google Voice telling you what to do, which it seems to no longer do) and other infuriating misdirections.
If this has been your experience, look no further! I was finally able to puzzle out how to get it working again after I got a new phone. The instructions are
New Instructions
- If you want to clear out the old call forwarding information
- Dial ##004#
- You should then get a message that your call forwarding settings have been reset
- When you’re ready to set up call forwarding, do the following
- **61*1+YourPhoneNumber# (Don’t forget the # at the end)
- Example: **61*15555555555#
- **62*1+YourPhoneNumber#
- **67*1+YourPhoneNumber#
- **61*1+YourPhoneNumber# (Don’t forget the # at the end)
- You may also need to go into your Phone app settings and disable visual voicemail
Once you’ve done this, you should now get your voicemail working as you’d expect.
Old Instructions
- If you want to clear out the old call forwarding information
- Dial ##004#
- You should then get a message that your call forwarding settings have been reset
- Finally, you will want to enter the following
- Dial **004*1<your google voice phone number>#
- Example **004*15555555555#
- Note! Yes, that’s a # at the end, NOT a *
- You should then get a message that your call forwarding has successfully been enabled
- Dial **004*1<your google voice phone number>#
It’s befuddling to me that both Google and T-Mobile don’t have this displayed very plainly on their websites or in their documentation. Anyway, if this helped you, please let me know in the comments!
This!!! So simple and works perfect! Ignore all others!!!
Glad it helped!
Amazing!!! Thank you!!!!! Why was this so hard to find?
Amazing! Thank you so much, this should be the first search result!
This does not work on iphone 16 because the phone setting does not have conditional call forwarding,
You are a lifesaver! The only thing I can think is that maybe T-Mobile, and all the other carriers, want you to use their voicemail. Thanks again!
I totally agree. It really shouldn’t be this hard! Glad it helped you all.
Wow — thank you!
I’ve been using Google Voice since 2009 and couldn’t figure out why my wife’s voicemail suddenly switched to T-Mobile. I even had instructions how to fix this dating back to 2017 using the legcy settings. I spent hours today (7/22) trying to resolve the issue. Every time I called her number, it would ring and go straight to T-Mobile voicemail instead of Google Voice.
I finally googled “Google Voice not working with T-Mobile carrier” and clicked on the third search result — I was thrilled to find a comment dated May 2024 with updated instructions. After following your steps, everything worked perfectly!
Thank you again for sharing this solution — it saved me a lot of frustration!