Travel eSIM Statistics 2026
By Axis Intelligence Research
Co-author: Alex Rivera (Consumer Tech) | Last updated: September 15, 2026 | License: CC BY 4.0
A one-week trip with 3 GB of data costs $84.00 on a US carrier day pass and $8.99 on a travel eSIM. Axis Intelligence Research puts the Travel Roaming Premium Index (TRPI) at 9.6 on that standardised trip — the first baseline reading of a metric built from carrier and vendor prices verified on the day of publication.
Quick Answer
Axis Intelligence Research finds that a traveller taking the Axis Standard Trip — seven days abroad, 3 GB of data, one line — pays $84.00 through AT&T’s or Verizon’s international day pass and $8.99 through a published travel eSIM plan, a gap of $75.01 and a Travel Roaming Premium Index reading of 9.6. Inside Europe, where roaming is regulated, the picture is different: BEREC reports that EEA operators charged an average of €4.42 per GB for data used outside the EEA in Q3 2025, down 13.7% year on year.
Key Findings
- Axis Intelligence Research measures the Travel Roaming Premium Index at 9.6 as of 14 September 2026, meaning a standardised seven-day, 3 GB trip costs 9.6 times more through a US carrier day pass than through a published travel eSIM plan.
- AT&T charges $12.00 per day for International Day Pass on land in more than 210 destinations, with a cap of ten chargeable days per line per billing cycle, according to AT&T’s own international travel page.
- BEREC’s 32nd International Roaming Benchmark Report, covering 148 European roaming providers, records an EEA average retail price of €4.42 per GB for data roaming outside the EEA in Q3 2025, down from €5.12 per GB a year earlier.
- GSMA Intelligence puts eSIM smartphone penetration at 5% at the end of 2025, forecast to reach 10% by the end of 2026 and to overtake removable SIMs by 2030.
- Axis Intelligence Research calculates that at most 38.7% of the 1,546 million international arrivals recorded in 2025 landed inside the EU-27, the world’s only large-scale roam-like-at-home perimeter — leaving at least six trips in ten exposed to unregulated roaming pricing.
Source: Axis Intelligence Research — Travel eSIM Statistics 2026
What Does a Travel eSIM Actually Cost in 2026?
The prices below were read from the sellers’ own published pages on 14 September 2026. No aggregator, no comparison site, no estimate.
| Plan | Data | Validity | Price (USD) | Price per GB | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Saily, France / Italy / US | 1 GB | 7 days | 3.99 | 3.99 | Saily Help Centre |
| Saily, France / Italy / US / UK | 3 GB | — | 8.99 | 3.00 | Saily Help Centre |
| Saily, United Kingdom | 1 GB | 7 days | 4.49 | 4.49 | Saily Help Centre |
| Saily, Turkey | 3 GB | — | 6.99 | 2.33 | Saily Help Centre |
| Airalo, Japan | 1 GB | 7 days | 4.50 | 4.50 | Airalo (published July 2025) |
| Airalo, Japan | 3 GB | 30 days | 8.50 | 2.83 | Airalo (published July 2025) |
| Airalo, Japan | 20 GB | 30 days | 26.00 | 1.30 | Airalo (published July 2025) |
The shape is consistent across both sellers and all five destinations: the entry gigabyte costs roughly $4, and the price per gigabyte falls by more than two thirds as the bundle grows. Turkey undercuts Western Europe at the same data tier, which is a wholesale-cost signal rather than a promotion.
Alex Rivera: Buy the tier above the one you think you need. The 1 GB plan is the trial size — $3.99 in France, $4.50 in Japan — and it exists to get you through the app store, not through a trip. Step up to 3 GB and the gigabyte drops to about $3. Step up to 20 GB in Japan and it drops to $1.30. Running out on day four and topping up in a hotel lobby costs more in irritation than the $17 you saved at checkout.
How That Compares With a Carrier Day Pass
| Route | 7-day cost | Structure | Effective $/GB at 3 GB | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AT&T International Day Pass | 84.00 | $12.00/day, land | 28.00 | AT&T |
| Verizon TravelPass | 84.00 | $12.00/day, 5 GB/day high speed | 28.00 | Verizon |
| Saily 3 GB | 8.99 | fixed bundle | 3.00 | Saily |
| Airalo Japan 3 GB | 8.50 | fixed bundle | 2.83 | Airalo |
The two products are not priced on the same axis, and that is the whole story. The day pass sells days. The travel eSIM sells gigabytes. Verizon’s TravelPass includes 5 GB of high-speed data per day before throttling to 3G speeds, so a traveller using 3 GB across an entire week is nowhere near the data ceiling — they are paying seven times for a resource they consumed once. AT&T’s pass works the same way, with a ten-day cap that puts a $120 ceiling on a month of land travel.
That cap is the most interesting number AT&T publishes. It implies the carrier’s own view of what a month of roaming is worth: $120. Airalo sells 20 GB over 30 days in Japan for $26.00. The ratio is 4.6.
How Much Do European Travellers Pay to Roam Outside the EU?
Inside the EEA, retail roaming is the domestic price — that is what Roam Like At Home means, and it is why European roaming statistics get boring fast. Outside it, the meter runs, and BEREC measures it.
The 32nd BEREC International Roaming Benchmark Data and Monitoring Report, adopted 12 March 2026, collects data from 148 roaming providers — 100 MNOs and 48 MVNOs or resellers — covering close to 95% of EEA mobile subscribers. Its Rest-of-World retail series is the most credible roaming price index published anywhere, because the operators report it to regulators rather than to marketers.
EEA Average Retail Prices for Roaming Outside the EEA
| Quarter | Data (€/GB) | SMS (€ cents) | Voice made (€ cents/min) | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Q4 2024 | 5.12 | 8.85 | 27.12 | BEREC |
| Q1 2025 | 5.47 | 9.63 | 26.50 | BEREC |
| Q2 2025 | 5.05 | 10.67 | 26.16 | BEREC |
| Q3 2025 | 4.42 | 11.20 | 26.69 | BEREC |
Data fell 13.7% over the four quarters. SMS rose 26.6%. Voice barely moved. A European traveller sending texts outside the EEA in late 2025 was paying more than a year earlier, while the same traveller’s gigabytes got cheaper — which tells you something about which service operators still believe has pricing power and which one they have conceded.
The Wholesale Reference Ratio
BEREC also publishes what operators charge each other. The EEA average wholesale rate for roaming data on total traffic was €0.57 per GB in Q3 2025, against a regulated cap that fell from €1.55 to €1.30 per GB at the start of 2025. Wholesale rates sat well under the cap all year, so the cap is not what is setting the price.
Axis Intelligence Research computes a wholesale reference ratio: the EEA average retail price for Rest-of-World data divided by the EEA average intra-EEA wholesale rate for the same quarter.
| Quarter | Retail RoW (€/GB) | Wholesale intra-EEA (€/GB) | Reference ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Q4 2024 | 5.12 | 0.67 | 7.6 |
| Q1 2025 | 5.47 | 0.57 | 9.6 |
| Q2 2025 | 5.05 | 0.61 | 8.3 |
| Q3 2025 | 4.42 | 0.57 | 7.8 |
These are two different routes — retail traffic outside the EEA measured against wholesale traffic inside it — so the ratio is a reference point, not a margin, and Axis Intelligence Research does not present it as one. Merging the two into a single “markup” figure would produce a number that means nothing, which is exactly why we publish them side by side instead.
What the series does show is stability. Retail RoW data fell 13.7% across the year and intra-EEA wholesale fell 14.9%. The ratio ends the period almost exactly where it started. Prices came down; the relationship between them did not move.
Alex Rivera: For a European heading outside the EU, this is the one number worth knowing before you fly, because it sets what your own operator will charge you when you forget to switch data roaming off. It fell 13.7% in a year and it is still €4.42 a gigabyte. Every other line moved differently — texts got 26.6% more expensive, calls did nothing. Your carrier has quietly conceded data and is holding its price on the things it thinks you cannot avoid.
The Number Nobody Quotes: Satellite Roaming
BEREC began collecting retail prices for roaming on non-terrestrial networks in 2021. In Q3 2025 the EEA average was €149.37 per GB, down from €166.68 a year earlier. Against the €4.42 terrestrial RoW average, satellite data costs 33.8 times more per gigabyte. That market is young and thin enough that the unit prices swing hard between quarters, but the order of magnitude is the point: direct-to-device satellite is not a roaming substitute at these prices. It is an emergency service with an emergency price.
The Travel Roaming Premium Index (TRPI)
TRPI — Travel Roaming Premium Index. The cost of the Axis Standard Trip through the traveller’s home operator, divided by the cost of the same trip through a published travel eSIM plan. A reading of 1.0 means parity. A reading of 9.6 means the operator route costs 9.6 times as much.
The Axis Standard Trip
One traveller, one line, seven days abroad, 3 GB of mobile data, at a destination outside the operator’s included-roaming zone. The 3 GB basket is used because it is the smallest allowance above 1 GB published by both sampled sellers, which makes the comparison direct rather than interpolated. Seven days matches the modal leisure trip structure the day-pass products themselves are built around.
Baseline Readings, 14 September 2026
| Pair | Carrier cost | eSIM cost | TRPI |
|---|---|---|---|
| AT&T vs Saily | 84.00 | 8.99 | 9.3 |
| AT&T vs Airalo (Japan) | 84.00 | 8.50 | 9.9 |
| Verizon vs Saily | 84.00 | 8.99 | 9.3 |
| Verizon vs Airalo (Japan) | 84.00 | 8.50 | 9.9 |
| Composite (unweighted mean) | 9.6 |
This is the baseline reading. It carries no comparison to earlier periods because no earlier periods have been computed.
Methodology of the Index
- Inputs: carrier day-pass rates and travel eSIM plan prices, each read from the seller’s own published page and logged with a retrieval date. No aggregator data enters the index.
- Formula: TRPI = (daily carrier rate × 7) ÷ (published price of the 3 GB travel eSIM plan for the same market). The composite is the unweighted mean of all carrier-vendor pairs in the sample.
- Weighting: each pair counts once. No weighting by market share, because reliable per-vendor traveller volumes are not published by anyone.
- Currency: USD only. Prices in other currencies are not converted into the index; the European series is reported separately in euros.
- Sample: two US carriers, two travel eSIM sellers, five destination markets.
The Marginal Reading
There is a second, smaller number inside the same data, and it deserves as much attention as the headline.
Verizon sells additional high-speed data during a TravelPass session at $10.00 per 2 GB, which is $5.00 per gigabyte. Against Saily’s $3.00 per gigabyte at the 3 GB tier, the marginal TRPI is 1.7.
So the carrier premium is a bundling premium, not a capacity premium. On the margin, a US carrier sells a gigabyte abroad for under twice what a travel eSIM charges. It is the daily fee wrapped around that gigabyte — charged again every calendar day whether or not the traveller uses a single additional megabyte — that turns 1.7 into 9.6. The fee is not in the data. It is in the clock.
How Many Travellers Are Exposed to This?
UN Tourism’s World Tourism Barometer recorded 1,546 million international tourist arrivals in 2025, up 5.0% on 1,472 million in 2024. The first quarter of 2026 added 307 million arrivals, growth of 1.8%, held back by a 13.9% fall in the Middle East following the outbreak of conflict on 28 February 2026.
International Tourist Arrivals by Region, 2025
| Region | Arrivals (millions) | Share of world | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Europe | 809.6 | 52.4% | UN Tourism |
| — of which EU-27 | 598.5 | 38.7% | UN Tourism |
| Asia and the Pacific | 336.5 | 21.8% | UN Tourism |
| Americas | 219.7 | 14.2% | UN Tourism |
| Middle East | 100.1 | 6.5% | UN Tourism |
| Africa | 79.6 | 5.1% | UN Tourism |
| World | 1,546 | 100% | UN Tourism |
Axis Intelligence Research uses these figures to size the exposed population. The EU-27 accounted for 38.7% of 2025 arrivals. Because Roam Like At Home protects EEA subscribers travelling inside the EEA, that share is the upper bound on the proportion of the world’s trips that could fall under regulated roaming — and the real figure is lower, since a large share of EU-27 arrivals come from travellers based outside the EEA who get no protection from it.
Which means: at least 61.3% of international arrivals in 2025 took place outside the world’s only large-scale regulated roaming perimeter. That is the addressable market for travel eSIM, expressed the honest way — as a ceiling on regulation rather than a floor under demand.
We stop there. Multiplying 1,546 million arrivals by a per-trip premium would produce a headline-friendly market size and an indefensible one, because nobody publishes the share of travellers who actually buy a roaming product rather than living on hotel Wi-Fi. That number does not exist, so it does not appear here.
Is the Handset Base Ready for Travel eSIM?
GSMA Intelligence puts eSIM smartphone penetration at 5% at the end of 2025, forecasts 10% by the end of 2026, a further doubling in 2027, and eSIM connections overtaking removable SIMs by 2030. The Mobile Economy 2026 forecasts 2.5 billion eSIM-enabled smartphone connections by 2028 and eSIM accounting for 42% of all SIM technologies by 2030.
Read that penetration figure carefully, because it measures the wrong thing for this market.
Penetration counts connections running on an eSIM profile. A travel eSIM is almost always a second profile. The traveller keeps their home physical SIM active for calls and texts, adds a travel data profile for the trip, then deletes it on the way home. At home, that subscriber is counted as a physical-SIM connection. During the trip, the travel profile sits on a foreign operator’s books, not the home operator’s. The most-cited adoption metric in this industry structurally undercounts the use case that drives it — which is worth remembering the next time a 5% figure is used to argue that travel eSIM is a niche.
The Device Milestones That Actually Moved the Base
| Date | Event | Source |
|---|---|---|
| August 2025 | Google ships US Pixel 10, 10 Pro and 10 Pro XL as eSIM-only, no SIM tray | GSMA Intelligence |
| September 2025 | Apple introduces iPhone 17 Air, its first globally released model with no physical SIM tray | GSMA Intelligence |
| October 2025 | China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom launch eSIM smartphone trials after MIIT approval | GSMA Intelligence |
| October 2025 | Oppo launches the Find X9 series, its first eSIM-enabled flagship line | GSMA Intelligence |
Removing the SIM tray from a flagship is not a spec change, it is a distribution decision. It makes the profile-download flow the only flow, and it makes the travel eSIM seller’s install experience identical to the home operator’s.
The activation data confirms the scale of that shift. GSMA Intelligence reports that a North American operator with more than 80 million subscribers saw activation traffic multiply by five on the first day of an eSIM-only iPhone launch, grow 130% in the first week and more than 300% over the first month.
Awareness Is No Longer the Constraint — Distribution Is
GSMA Intelligence surveys show consumer eSIM awareness climbing from 25% to 60%, with more than half of consumers expressing interest. But only 8% of aware consumers discovered eSIM through their own operator’s commercial push, and while 73% of mobile network operators have launched commercial eSIM for smartphones, GSMA’s own assessment is that many are not promoting it.
Alex Rivera: Nobody learns about this from their carrier, and that is the whole reason the day pass survives. Six in ten people now know what an eSIM is; eight percent of them found out from the company that bills them. You will hear about it from a friend at the airport, from a review, or from the price shock on the bill after the last trip. That is a distribution gap, not a technology gap, and it is the only thing keeping a $12 daily fee alive on a product a traveller can replace in four minutes from the departure gate.
Where Roaming Quality Still Beats a Travel eSIM
The price case is one-sided. The service case is not, and a ranking that ignored this would be a ranking nobody should cite.
BEREC’s provider survey found that 83% of EEA roaming providers offer 5G non-standalone roaming and 15% offer 5G standalone, with 4G roaming universal. A home-operator roaming product also keeps the traveller’s own number live for calls and SMS — which still matters for two-factor authentication codes sent by SMS, for airline and hotel callbacks, and for anyone whose bank will not accept a data-only channel. Most travel eSIM data plans are exactly that: data only.
Two other structural details from the BEREC survey that travellers rarely see:
- 56% of roaming providers deduct consumption in non-EEA destinations from the traveller’s Roam Like At Home allowance on at least some tariffs. Using data in a third country can quietly eat the European allowance.
- Only 33% of providers offer alternative roaming tariffs alongside the regulated ones, and among those that do, monthly packages outnumber daily ones by more than three to one — the opposite of how travel eSIM sellers structure their shelves.
Methodology
Collection. Every figure in this dataset was retrieved from a primary source document on 14 September 2026. Carrier and vendor prices were read from the seller’s own published page. Regulatory figures come from BEREC’s 32nd International Roaming Benchmark Data and Monitoring Report, BoR (26) 28, adopted 12 March 2026 and covering 1 October 2024 to 30 September 2025. Tourism figures come from the UN Tourism World Tourism Barometer, volume 24 issue 2, May 2026, revised July 2026, with data collection completed 20 May 2026. Adoption figures come from GSMA Intelligence’s The Mobile Economy 2026 and its May 2026 eSIM deployment assessment. No comparison site, price aggregator or secondary statistics compilation was used as a source for any value.
Formulas. The Axis Standard Trip cost through a carrier is the published daily rate multiplied by seven. TRPI is that figure divided by the published price of a 3 GB travel eSIM plan for the same market; the composite is the unweighted mean of the four carrier-vendor pairs. The marginal TRPI divides Verizon’s published $10.00 per 2 GB top-up ($5.00 per GB) by Saily’s 3 GB plan price expressed per gigabyte ($3.00 per GB). The wholesale reference ratio divides BEREC’s EEA average retail Rest-of-World data price by BEREC’s EEA average intra-EEA wholesale data rate for the same quarter, and is reported as a reference point across two distinct routes rather than as a margin. The upper bound on regulated-roaming exposure subtracts the EU-27 share of 2025 arrivals (38.7%) from 100.
Scope. BEREC retail prices exclude VAT and blend postpaid and prepaid plans. Carrier day-pass prices apply to eligible postpaid unlimited plans and exclude taxes and fees. Travel eSIM prices are list prices before promotional codes, which are common in this market and would lower the eSIM side of every ratio. Airalo’s Japan prices carry a publisher date of July 2025 and are labelled accordingly; every other price carries a September 2026 date.
What would change these readings. A move away from flat daily pricing by a major US carrier, a change to the EU wholesale cap glide path, or a repricing of entry-tier travel eSIM plans.
About This Dataset
Contents. 81 observations covering travel eSIM plan prices, US carrier international roaming rates, EEA retail and wholesale roaming prices from Q4 2024 to Q3 2025, international tourist arrivals by region for 2024 and 2025 with Q1 2026, eSIM adoption forecasts to 2030, and every Axis-calculated figure in this article with its formula.
Structure. One row per observation, long format. Each row carries metric, value, unit, geography, segment, vendor, as_of_date, source_org, source_document, source_url, retrieved_date, is_primary, axis_calculated and method_note. Rows marked axis_calculated = yes carry the formula in method_note.
Licence. CC BY 4.0. Free to reuse, republish and build on, including commercially, with attribution.
Download: travel-esim-statistics.csv
Cite this research
APA — Axis Intelligence Research. (2026). Travel eSIM statistics 2026: Prices, adoption and the roaming premium. Axis Intelligence. https://axis-intelligence.com/travel-esim-statistics/
MLA — Axis Intelligence Research. “Travel eSIM Statistics 2026: Prices, Adoption and the Roaming Premium.” Axis Intelligence, 15 Sept. 2026, axis-intelligence.com/travel-esim-statistics/.
Chicago — Axis Intelligence Research. “Travel eSIM Statistics 2026: Prices, Adoption and the Roaming Premium.” Axis Intelligence, September 15, 2026. https://axis-intelligence.com/travel-esim-statistics/.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does a carrier day pass cost the same in every country when wholesale rates differ?
Because it is not priced off wholesale. BEREC’s data shows EEA wholesale data rates at €0.57 per GB on total traffic in Q3 2025, well below the €1.30 regulated cap, and varying by route and agreement. A flat $12 daily fee in 210-plus destinations averages across all of that. The traveller in an expensive market is subsidised by the traveller in a cheap one, and the carrier books a predictable margin on both.
Does a travel eSIM replace my phone number?
No, on a dual-profile device. The travel eSIM installs as a second profile carrying its own data connection while the home SIM or eSIM stays active for calls and SMS on your usual number. Most travel eSIM plans are data-only, which is why the home profile has to stay switched on if you need SMS-based two-factor codes — and why data roaming on that home profile should stay off.
Does the EU’s Roam Like At Home rule protect an American travelling in Europe?
It does not. Roam Like At Home binds EEA roaming providers serving their own subscribers travelling inside the EEA. A US subscriber in Paris is roaming on their US carrier’s international terms, which is why the TRPI premium applies in full to trips that look, from the traveller’s seat, like travel inside a regulated zone.
If my carrier’s roaming is “unlimited”, why is a travel eSIM still cheaper?
Because the unlimited allowance is per day, not per trip. Verizon’s TravelPass includes 5 GB of high-speed data per day before dropping to 3G speeds. A traveller using 3 GB over a whole week never approaches that ceiling, yet pays the daily fee seven times. The Axis marginal TRPI shows the gap on an extra gigabyte is only 1.7 — the premium sits in the days, not the data.
What happens when I hit a fair use policy on a travel eSIM?
It depends on which side of the FUP you are on. On a carrier roaming product inside the EEA, exceeding the fair use allowance triggers a surcharge, and BEREC found that 56% of providers also deduct non-EEA consumption from that same allowance. A travel eSIM has no FUP in that regulatory sense — a fixed-data plan simply stops when the bundle is exhausted, and unlimited plans throttle to a stated speed after a daily threshold set by the seller.
Do travel eSIM prices move with wholesale roaming rates?
Not visibly, over the period measured here. EEA wholesale data rates fell 14.9% between Q4 2024 and Q3 2025, while entry-tier travel eSIM prices across the sampled markets cluster tightly around $4 per gigabyte regardless of destination — except Turkey, where the 3 GB tier prices at $2.33 per GB against $3.00 in Western Europe. Travel eSIM pricing appears to track destination wholesale cost at the bundle level while holding a near-uniform entry price for acquisition.
Why is satellite roaming priced so far above terrestrial roaming?
BEREC’s Q3 2025 EEA average for data on non-terrestrial networks was €149.37 per GB against €4.42 per GB terrestrial outside the EEA, a multiple of 33.8. Direct-to-device satellite capacity is scarce, shared across a beam rather than a cell, and sold into a market BEREC only began measuring in 2021. At these prices it substitutes for no coverage at all, not for a travel eSIM.
Is eSIM penetration a reliable measure of travel eSIM usage?
It undercounts it by construction. Penetration measures the share of smartphone connections running on an eSIM profile. A traveller who keeps a physical home SIM and adds a temporary travel profile is counted at home as a physical-SIM connection, and the travel profile registers with a foreign operator for days or weeks. GSMA Intelligence’s 5% figure for end-2025 is an accurate measure of what it measures, and a poor proxy for how many trips use a travel eSIM.
Which is cheaper for a month-long trip?
The gap narrows but does not close. AT&T caps International Day Pass at ten chargeable days per line per billing cycle, so a month of land travel tops out at $120 on the published rate. Airalo’s 20 GB, 30-day Japan plan was published at $26.00. On those figures the carrier route costs 4.6 times more — against 9.6 on the seven-day standard trip. Long trips are where the day-pass model is least bad, which is the opposite of the assumption most travellers make.
Related research from Axis Intelligence Research: eSIM Statistics 2026 — the full adoption, shipments and market picture · eSIM Adoption by Country — penetration and operator launches market by market · eSIM IoT Statistics — SGP.32, cellular IoT and the enterprise deployment base.