Travel eSIM Unlimited Data Price Study 2026

Last updated on 5 September 2026

A week of unlimited mobile data costs a median of €9.90 across the 95 travel destinations in POVNOMAD’s catalogue (as of 5 September 2026). In 49 of the 95 countries — 52 percent — the weekly price is below €10. The spread between continents is wide: Europe has a median of €7.90 per week, Africa €18.90 — €11 more, a factor of 2.4.

For travellers, the price of unlimited data is not a side issue. Navigation, translation, bookings and contact back home all run over a mobile connection, and “unlimited” promises exactly that: no counting data while travelling. That this segment is no niche topic is shown by a forecast from GSMA Intelligence: eSIM smartphone connections are set to double between 2025 and 2026 and rise to 4.9 billion by 2030, around 55 percent of all smartphone connections worldwide; 51 percent of eSIM users in eleven core countries use their eSIM primarily for travel abroad (GSMA Intelligence, “Consumer eSIM”, August 2025, cited via telecomlead.com, 21.08.2025, accessed 05.09.2026; the original report is paywalled).

This study answers two questions with our own catalogue data: what does unlimited data cost worldwide, and what do providers mean by “unlimited”? Method and raw data are published openly. The study is meant to be repeated yearly, so it can then show how prices for unlimited travel data develop over time.

Methodology and conflict of interest

The benchmark: unlimited data versus roaming plans

To put the €9.90 in context, here is the alternative without a travel eSIM. The three major German carriers charge between €9.99 and €34.99 outside the EU for booked weekly options — consistently for capped, not unlimited, data.

• Vodafone “ReisePaket World” (a German carrier roaming pass): €34.99 per week for 4 GB in more than 100 countries outside the EU, equivalent to €8.75 per gigabyte (vodafone.de and InfoDok 443, as of August 2026, accessed 05.09.2026).
• o2: without a booked option, the standard rate outside the EU is €12.29 per megabyte, working out to more than €12,000 per gigabyte. With an option, “Roaming Plus World” (a German carrier add-on) costs €9.99 for 1 GB over 7 days in 109 countries (o2online.de, pricing details also via teltarif.de, as of 2026, accessed 05.09.2026).
• Telekom “Travel & Surf” (Deutsche Telekom’s roaming pass): data passes outside the EU start at €5 to €7 for 7 days, €15.95 for 15 GB over 14 days, €29.95 for 50 GB over 28 days. Mobile data outside the EU only works after actively booking a data pass (telekom.com, updated 25.06.2026, accessed 05.09.2026).

The comparison does not always favour the eSIM, and that belongs here too: Telekom’s 15 GB data pass at €15.95 over 14 days works out to €7.98 per week and €1.06 per gigabyte — on a price-per-gigabyte basis, that is below this study’s median of €1.41 per high-speed gigabyte. The difference lies in the structure: the data pass ends after 15 GB, after which top-ups follow. Unlimited plans throttle instead, and keep running. Travellers who reliably stay under the allowance sometimes do better with a data pass; those who would rather not keep count buy exactly that peace of mind with an Unlimited plan.

The gap is clearest with Vodafone and o2’s standard rate: €34.99 per week for 4 GB is 3.5 times this study’s median of €9.90, for capped rather than unlimited data. o2’s standard price of €12.29 per megabyte is the worst case for anyone who books nothing before travelling.

The world map of unlimited prices

Across all 95 countries, the mean is €13.33 per week, well above the median of €9.90. The gap between the two figures shows that the majority of countries sit in the cheaper range, while a few expensive outliers pull the average up. The range runs from €7.90 to €39.90.

Converted to the daily high-speed allowance, this study’s median is €1.41 per high-speed gigabyte, regardless of whether the allowance is 1, 2 or 3 GB per day. The calculation behind this for a single country: a Smart plan with 1 GB of high-speed data per day costs €7.90 for 7 days in Austria — 7 gigabytes of high-speed data, so €7.90 divided by 7 is roughly €1.13 per high-speed gigabyte. This figure is calculated individually for each of the 95 countries; the middle value of these 95 figures, the median, is €1.41.

The full portfolio behind these figures is broader than a single comparison figure can show: of the 99 products with an Unlimited option, the Smart tier accounts for 97, L for 31 and XL for 52, together 3,303 bookable packages across all durations. For the continental and extreme values in this study, only the reference size — Smart, 7 days — counts.

Europe is the only region where the minimum and median coincide: €7.90. More than 30 of the 41 European countries sit at exactly this price. The region prices unlimited data largely uniformly rather than tiered by destination.

A regulatory framework explains part of this. The revised EU Roaming Regulation extends “Roam like at home” until 2032; travellers within the EU and EEA pay the same prices for calls, texts and data as at home (European Commission, 01.07.2022, accessed 05.09.2026). The Council of the EU also agreed on falling wholesale rates, with a target of €1 per gigabyte from 2027 (Council of the EU, 04.04.2022, accessed 05.09.2026). A regulated wholesale price and a dense provider market thus put downward pressure on the purchasing side in Europe, while outside the EU both are absent. How much of the €7.90 uniformity is due to the regulation and how much to other factors is not quantified by this study.

At the other end are Africa and Oceania, with the highest median values, €18.90 and €24.90. Higher network infrastructure or data procurement costs would be an obvious explanation. We do not have solid external evidence for this, and the data in this study cannot substitute for it: it shows the price difference, not its cause. We therefore treat the question as open, not as a finding.

Between these poles sit Asia, the Americas and the Middle East, with median values between €10.90 and €16.90, each with a wide range within the region. In the Americas, the minimum is €7.90 and the maximum €38.90 — a difference of €31 within a single continent. These three regions cannot be reduced to a single price trend; they contain cheap and very expensive countries side by side.

The extremes

The cheapest price group, €7.90 per week, includes more than 30 European countries, among them Austria, Spain, the United Kingdom and Denmark.

The most expensive is DR Congo at €39.90, followed by Panama (€38.90) and Gabon (€35.90). Next come Mongolia, Samoa and Vanuatu at €30.90 each, then Bhutan (€29.90), Senegal (€25.90), and Guam and Mauritius at €24.90 each.

DR Congo, at €39.90, is €32 above the European standard price of €7.90 — a factor of 5. These extreme values, however, come mostly from small country groups: in this study, Africa comprises 12 countries and Oceania 5. Individual expensive countries such as DR Congo, Gabon or Vanuatu therefore shape the picture of their region more strongly than they would in a larger group. The note from the methodology section applies especially here.

What stands out about the list of the most expensive countries is their geographic spread. Panama is in the Americas, Gabon and Senegal in Africa; Mongolia, Samoa, Vanuatu, Bhutan and Guam are spread across three further continents. High prices for unlimited data are therefore not a phenomenon of a single region, but occur wherever individual countries stand out from their continent’s price level.

These countries also mark the edges when it comes to price per high-speed gigabyte: anyone paying €7.90 for a Smart package is at around €1.13 per gigabyte, below the median of €1.41; anyone paying €39.90 is at around €5.70 per gigabyte, well above it.

What “unlimited” really means: what the sales pages say

This section records what the three providers state publicly on their own pages as of the respective reference date — not whether those statements have been independently verified. This also applies to POVNOMAD: our own figures come from our own product page and are likewise self-reported.

“Unlimited” is not unconditionally unlimited with any of the three providers. All three throttle to a lower speed after a daily allowance. How openly they state this condition differs.

POVNOMAD states both figures: the daily threshold in gigabytes, which depends on the plan tier, and the subsequent throttled speed of 1 Mbit/s.

Airalo states the daily threshold for individual countries — for Egypt, for instance, “3 GB per day” (airalo.com/m/esim/unlimited-packages, accessed 31.08.2026). Airalo does not state the throttled speed afterwards on its own pages.

Holafly states neither a daily threshold nor a throttled speed, and instead refers to the respective carriers’ fair-usage policy (Holafly FAQ, accessed 31.08.2026). For China, two of Holafly’s own pages contradict each other: the sales page advertises WhatsApp, Instagram and TikTok without restriction, while its own guide states “WhatsApp has been banned in China since 2017” (esim.holafly.com/internet/does-whatsapp-work-in-china/, both accessed 01.09.2026).

For travellers, this results in three possible starting points when asking what “unlimited” actually means in a booked plan: a stated daily threshold with a stated throttled speed, a stated daily threshold without any indication of the speed afterwards, or a reference to an external fair-usage policy without any figures of its own. Which of these is sufficient for a purchase decision depends on the destination country and one’s own data needs.

Three direct comparisons, and the rule for choosing them

Beyond the catalogue analysis, POVNOMAD collected three price comparisons directly from providers’ sales pages, each for Unlimited plans with a 7-day duration unless noted otherwise.

On the selection, frankly: these are the only three countries for which reproducible competitor prices from the competitors’ own pages were available as of the respective reference date. It is not a random sample, nor the result of a broader survey from which we picked the cheapest cases. A systematic full comparison across all 95 countries failed because Airalo’s and Holafly’s pricing pages load prices via JavaScript and so cannot be read out reliably, automatically and reproducibly. Countries with a different outcome are therefore explicitly not excluded; they simply were not surveyed for this edition.

• Egypt (reference date 31.08.2026): POVNOMAD €18.90, Airalo €28.50, Holafly €33.90.
• USA (reference date 01.09.2026): POVNOMAD Smart €10.90, Airalo €22.50. The POVNOMAD price comes from our own system as of the reference date; the Airalo price was retrieved five times and was identical on every retrieval, to rule out dynamic pricing display.
• Turkey (reference date 25.08.2026): POVNOMAD Smart, 30 days, €26.90. Airalo and Holafly are blocked there, according to a BTK ruling from July 2025. POVNOMAD does not appear on any published block list known to us (as of 25.08.2026). This is an observation as of that reference date, not official confirmation of unimpeded status, and the situation can change.

Further competitor prices are not available for this study in verified form. Additional comparisons will follow in future editions.

In the two cases with a direct price comparison, Egypt and the USA, POVNOMAD is priced below Airalo and Holafly. The third case, Turkey, is not a price comparison: no competitor price exists there to undercut, because both providers are blocked. That case is about availability, not price. Two price comparisons are not a market average; they show that the price levels measured in the catalogue analysis recur in two individually documented cases with reference dates — nothing more.

What travellers search for

For this study, POVNOMAD additionally queried the Google Suggest API on 02.09.2026, separately for the German-language (hl=de/gl=de) and English-language (hl=en/gl=us) markets. For 46 destination countries, four queries each were run, including “esim <country> u…” and the reverse-completion query “esim unbegrenzt …” (German for “esim unlimited …”).

For all 16 countries POVNOMAD was already supplying with an offer at the time of the survey, German-language search demand for “unlimited” existed. In not a single case did the Suggest API return a negation.

The strongest unmet demand was shown by Tunisia and Sri Lanka: both countries ranked first in all four queries, without any competitor or blog offer for unlimited data appearing in these four Suggest queries. This statement applies only to the Suggest queries; an analysis of the search results pages themselves was not part of the survey.

For four countries — Qatar, Argentina, Colombia and Cuba — only English-language demand was found. German-language search suggestions stayed at zero.

Our own perspective belongs here too: a recognised demand gap is, for POVNOMAD, also a possible next step in our own range planning. We do not hide that this section has two audiences.

The Suggest API reflects what other users have already searched for. It is a demand indicator, not a market analysis. For the 16 supplied countries, it confirms that German-language demand for “unlimited” genuinely exists; for Tunisia and Sri Lanka, it shows a gap as of the reference date.

Frequently asked questions

Reuse and contact

The figures and dataset in this study are free to use, with attribution to povnomad.com and a link to this study. This applies equally to the core statistics, the continent table, the extreme values and the complete CSV dataset.

The conflict of interest is stated in the methodology section at the start of this study: POVNOMAD is an eSIM provider and sets the prices analysed here itself. Checking the results requires no trust in us — only the dataset.

Data as of: 5 September 2026. External sources accessed on 05.09.2026, competitor prices as of the reference dates stated in each case.

For press inquiries: service@povnomad.com.