What Channel Is ABC? Local Channel Numbers by City and Provider

There is no national ABC channel number, and any page that gives you one is guessing. ABC is not a cable network with a single feed piped everywhere. It is roughly 220 separately licensed local stations, each with its own call letters, its own newsroom and its own channel number. The ABC in Houston is a different company from the ABC in Boston.

Channel 7 is the most common answer, which is why it gets repeated so often. But it is only correct in about a third of the largest markets. Below are the actual numbers for 35 of them, verified against current station listings in August 2026, followed by the part nobody explains: why these numbers survived the switch to digital, and why yours might disappear one day after a perfectly ordinary software update.

The numbers, 35 markets

City	Station	Channel
New York	WABC	7
Los Angeles	KABC	7
Chicago	WLS	7
Philadelphia	WPVI	6
Dallas-Fort Worth	WFAA	8
San Francisco	KGO	7
Washington DC	WJLA	7
Houston	KTRK	13
Boston	WCVB	5
Atlanta	WSB	2
Phoenix	KNXV	15
Seattle	KOMO	4
Detroit	WXYZ	7
Minneapolis-St. Paul	KSTP	5
Tampa-St. Petersburg	WFTS	28
Denver	KMGH	7
Orlando	WFTV	9
Miami-Fort Lauderdale	WPLG	10
Cleveland	WEWS	5
Sacramento	KXTV	10
Charlotte	WSOC	9
Portland, OR	KATU	2
Raleigh-Durham	WTVD	11
St. Louis	KDNL	30
Pittsburgh	WTAE	4
Indianapolis	WRTV	6
Baltimore	WMAR	2
San Diego	KGTV	10
Nashville	WKRN	2
Salt Lake City	KTVX	4
San Antonio	KSAT	12
Columbus, OH	WSYX	6
Kansas City	KMBC	9
Milwaukee	WISN	12
Las Vegas	KTNV	13

Eleven of those 35 are on channel 7. The rest run from 2 to 30, and St. Louis at channel 30 shows how far the outliers stretch.

While you have the table open, look at Dallas. The station is WFAA, a W call sign, several hundred miles west of the Mississippi River. The usual rule is that W stations sit east of the river and K stations west, and it holds almost everywhere. But the rule was only applied consistently from 1923 onward, and stations licensed before that kept what they already had. WFAA is one. Philadelphia’s KYW and Pittsburgh’s KDKA are two more, both K stations sitting comfortably in the east. If you are using call letters to work out whether a station is local to you, those legacy exceptions are the ones that will catch you out.

Why your ABC number outlived analog TV

Here is something that confuses people who think about it for more than a second. Analog broadcasting ended in the United States in 2009. Every station moved to digital transmission on a different set of frequencies. So why is WABC in New York still on channel 7, the same number it used in 1948?

Because the number you see is not the frequency you are receiving. It is a label.

Digital stations broadcast a small packet of data called PSIP alongside the picture, and PSIP tells your TV what number to display. Stations chose to keep their old analog numbers, because those numbers were worth money. Decades of “News on 7” branding does not survive being renumbered to 31. So WABC transmits on one physical radio frequency and instructs every TV in range to file it under 7. The physical channel and the displayed channel have had nothing to do with each other for years.

This matters for one practical reason. Between 2017 and 2020 the FCC repacked the broadcast spectrum and moved hundreds of stations to different physical frequencies. The displayed numbers stayed put, so most viewers never noticed, except the ones whose channel simply vanished, because their TV was still tuned to a frequency the station had left. The fix was a rescan, and it is still the fix today. If an over-the-air channel disappears and the rest are fine, rescan before you assume the antenna has failed.

The same system explains subchannels. Your ABC station is 7.1. The 7.2, 7.3 and 7.4 sitting next to it are separate networks entirely, usually classic TV or lifestyle diginets, squeezed into the same transmission. They are free, they are rarely listed anywhere useful, and most antenna owners have never scrolled far enough to find them.

If your city is not in the table

There are around 220 ABC stations and no table covers them all. Four ways to get your own number, roughly in order of speed:

• Enter your provider and ZIP into our Channel Finder, which returns the exact number plus package and HD details for DIRECTV, DISH, Xfinity, Spectrum, Cox, Optimum, Fios, Mediacom and Frontier.
• Press Guide on your remote and type ABC. Every box built in the last decade jumps straight to it.
• On an antenna, run a channel scan and let the station tell your TV where it belongs.
• If the guide shows call letters instead of “ABC”, search the call sign, and remember the W/K exceptions above.

Cable, satellite and the satellite oddity

Every provider drops your local ABC into the block of local channels assigned to your market. DIRECTV usually mirrors the over-the-air number exactly. DISH tends to place locals in the 2 to 99 range. Verizon Fios splits standard and HD onto separate numbers. Xfinity, Spectrum, Cox, Optimum and Mediacom all vary market to market with no pattern worth memorising.

The genuine oddity is on satellite. If you live somewhere your local ABC affiliate physically cannot be delivered (too far from the market, or a carriage dispute), DIRECTV and DISH can supply Distant Network Service, which pipes in an ABC station from another city. You have to qualify for it, and it is rarer than the internet suggests, but it is why a handful of people genuinely do watch New York’s ABC news in the middle of nowhere.

The Hulu trap

Beyond that, live local ABC comes with YouTube TV, Fubo and DIRECTV Stream in most markets. Sling is the one to check first, because it carries local ABC in only a handful of cities, and our Sling Orange vs Blue breakdown covers what each plan actually includes before you pay for it.

Or pay nothing at all

ABC broadcasts free over the air in full HD. An indoor antenna picks it up anywhere in signal range with no subscription, no login and no monthly cost, and the same antenna delivers CBS, NBC and Fox alongside it. For a lot of households, four networks free forever is a better deal than any package, and it is worth working out what you would actually lose before paying for locals you can already receive.

Worth knowing if you are buying hardware this year: stations are gradually rolling out ATSC 3.0, marketed as NextGen TV, which adds 4K and better reception in difficult areas. It needs a tuner that supports it, so a cheap antenna paired with an older TV will keep receiving the standard signal but not the upgraded one. Nothing you own stops working. You just will not see the improvement.

What you actually get

ABC’s schedule leans harder on sport every year, which follows from Disney also owning ESPN. It carries the NBA Finals, roughly twenty regular season NBA games, a share of Monday Night Football simulcasts, and Super Bowl LXI on 14 February 2027, split with ESPN, the first Super Bowl ever to air on that network. All of it free, if you have the antenna.

The rest is Good Morning America, World News Tonight, Jimmy Kimmel Live, Grey’s Anatomy, the Bachelor franchise, and the Academy Awards, which ABC has held for decades. Then there is the local news your station makes itself, which is different in every market, and the reason these 220 stations exist as separate businesses at all.

One caveat on everything above: station ownership changes, cable numbers get reshuffled without warning, and the numbers here reflect August 2026. Your own guide is always the last word. If you want to check a different network, USA Network and AMC have the same treatment, and the Channel Finder covers everything else.