Europe's Roaming Caps Do Not Protect Visitors: What Mobile Data Really Costs in Europe
carrier coverage area protect European SIM holders only. A visitor roaming on a US carrier day pass pays $12.00 per day, while the median price of 1 GB on a local travel eSIM across 43 European destinations is $1.27: one day of carrier roaming buys the equivalent of 9.4 GB of local data.
Key findings
All figures from the frozen July 2026 edition of the Europe eSIM Price Index: 11-reseller panel, USD at the exchange rate frozen on publication (1.1415).
The cap that does not travel with you
Europe's "carrier coverage" regulation abolished roaming surcharges, but only for SIM cards issued inside the EU and EEA. Visitors from the United States, Canada, the UK (partially), Asia or Latin America get none of that protection. Their default option is their home carrier's day pass: AT&T International Day Pass and Verizon TravelPass both charge $12.00 per day in Europe (rates as published July 2026; Verizon caps high-speed use at 5 GB per session).
Against that, the local market is cheap and getting cheaper: the median price of 1 GB across the 43 European destinations we track is $1.27. A 10-day trip on a carrier day pass costs $120.00; the same money buys roughly 94.5 GB of prepaid eSIM data at the regional median.
The gap widened over the summer: the European median fell from $1.57 to $1.26 between May 24, 2026 and July 27, 2026 (-19.7%), the sharpest regional drop we measured this season, across 10 weekly readings.
The July 2026 extremes
| # | Cheapest markets | Avg / GB |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Turkey | $0.91 |
| 2 | Germany | $1.18 |
| 3 | Italy | $1.18 |
| 4 | Spain | $1.18 |
| 5 | Switzerland | $1.18 |
| # | Most expensive | Avg / GB |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Monaco | $31.08 |
| 2 | Andorra | $3.94 |
| 3 | Bosnia and Herzegovina | $2.79 |
| 4 | North Macedonia | $2.39 |
| 5 | Serbia | $1.74 |
Charts (free to reuse with credit)
Reusable figures (CC BY 4.0)
Quote freely with attribution to Drift Europa and a link to this study:
- The median price of 1 GB of prepaid eSIM data across 43 European destinations is $1.27 (July 2026).
- One day of US carrier roaming in Europe ($12.00 on AT&T or Verizon day passes) equals the price of about 9.4 GB of local eSIM data at the regional median.
- European eSIM prices fell 19.7% between May 24, 2026 and July 27, 2026 (regional median, weekly series).
- EU carrier terms caps apply to EU/EEA SIM holders only; visitors from outside the bloc are not covered.
Full dataset (CSV) · Weekly series (JSON) · Press one-pager (PDF)
Methodology
Prices were collected in July 2026 across a fixed panel of 11 international eSIM resellers (Airalo, Nomad, Saily, Ubigi, Yesim and others). Each destination figure is the average price per gigabyte across the panel, converted from EUR to USD at the ECB reference rate frozen on publication (1.1415). The study covers the 43 Europe destinations that Drift Europa sells and that the panel prices. Weekly trend data comes from our price history, recorded every Monday since May 24, 2026. This is a one-shot study: figures are frozen as published and will not be revised.
The median is computed over all 43 priced destinations. For the cheapest and most expensive tables, we exclude only prices that rest on a thin panel: a market is dropped from the ranking when fewer than 3 resellers price it and its price sits above the regional median. This is the marker of a data artefact (a single niche reseller in a micro-market), not of a genuinely expensive destination, so legitimately costly markets with a full panel are kept. No market was excluded this month.
External carrier rates: AT&T International Day Pass and Verizon TravelPass, official pages, as published in July 2026. Carrier prices can change; the eSIM panel figures on this page are frozen.
Transparency
Drift Europa sells travel eSIMs. The panel behind this study includes our competitors, the raw data is published under CC BY 4.0, and every figure above can be recomputed from the CSV. Data questions and interview requests: via drifteuropa.com.