The private mobile phone numbers of hundreds of federal politicians, former prime ministers and senior political staffers have been inadvertently published online in an embarrassing blunder by a government department.

The Department of Parliamentary Services failed to properly delete the numbers before it published the most recent round of politicians' phone bills on the Parliament House website, potentially compromising the privacy and security of MPs from cabinet ministers down.

While in previous years the numbers were taken out of the PDF documents altogether, this time it appears the font was merely turned white - meaning they could still be accessed using copy and paste.