How Much Does a SIM Card Cost?

The card is nearly always free or close to it. Carriers give them away with a plan, charge a token amount for a replacement, and would rather you had one than not. If you are being quoted a meaningful sum for a SIM alone, you are being quoted for the plan bundled with it.

Which means the useful question is not what a SIM costs but what working data in another country costs. There are three ways to buy it and they differ by roughly an order of magnitude.

Ranges rather than prices, because tariffs vary by market and change constantly — but the ordering is stable:

• Your home carrier’s roaming, at a daily pass or a per-megabyte rate. Simplest, no setup, and consistently the most expensive per gigabyte.
• A local prepaid SIM bought on arrival. Usually the cheapest per gigabyte, at the cost of queueing, showing ID in many countries, and losing your own number while it is in the tray.
• A travel eSIM bought before you go. Close to local pricing, no queue, and — because a recent iPhone runs two lines at once, as recent Android phones do — your home number keeps working alongside it.

The gap between the first and the other two is the one that matters. It is routinely a factor of five or more, which is why the question is worth two minutes before a trip.

It often does, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest:

1. 1Long stays. Over a few weeks, local prepaid pricing is hard to beat, and you may want a local number anyway.
2. 2Markets with unusually cheap domestic data, where a local SIM undercuts everything.
3. 3A phone that cannot take an eSIM — no EID, no profile — where it is that or a rented hotspot.

A local SIM has real friction attached, and it is worth pricing your own time honestly:

• Registration. Many countries require ID to activate a prepaid SIM, which turns a purchase into a queue and some paperwork.
• Your own number goes quiet while the local card is in the tray, unless the phone takes two lines.
• Unused credit, which almost never comes back.
• Time on arrival, when it is the least available thing you have.

Roaming is not priced by cost. Your carrier pays the local operator wholesale and sets the retail figure themselves, which is why the same trip is free on one contract and expensive on another. UK government guidance makes the consequence explicit: since the UK left the EU, surcharge-free roaming in Europe is no longer guaranteed, and the statutory £45 ceiling on data used abroad lapsed with it — many providers kept that cap voluntarily, but it is no longer something you have by default. That is why checking the protections you already have, including a spend cap, is worth doing before you buy anything at all.

Some travellers are covered without knowing: an EU-issued line travelling in the EU has its domestic allowance included and should buy nothing. The rule now reaches Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Moldova and Ukraine too, and still excludes Switzerland and the UK.

Divide by the gigabytes. A daily pass looks small and a 10 GB plan looks large until you work out what each costs per GB over the length of your actual trip — which is the number we rank on. Plans by destination, and the ranking rules in full.