Your phone might be the priciest thing you pack.

Why every site gives you a different number

Typical figures, if you can't check right now

Every figure here is a rough starting point, not a quote — networks price by plan and contract date. These are typical figures, not promises. Premium plans, older contracts and business tariffs all differ. Use the calculator's step-one check to get yours properly — it takes about two minutes and it's the difference between an estimate and an answer.

The European countries that aren't "Europe"

Look your destination up directly if you already know where you're going — one row gives you all five networks' prices for it. The rest of this section explains why they differ so much.

Your network's Europe zone is a list it chooses, not a map of the continent — and EU membership predicts it surprisingly badly. EE's European zone, for example, runs to 47 destinations and includes nine places that are in neither the EU nor the EEA, while leaving out sixteen European countries entirely.

This uses EE's zones as a worked example because EE publishes its full list. Other networks draw the lines differently, so treat it as a guide to where the question arises rather than an answer for your own plan.

Pay monthly and pay as you go are different schemes

This trips people up because networks present roaming as a single policy, then apply a different one to PAYG customers. If you're on pay as you go, the figures quoted in most articles — including the ones on this page — are usually the pay monthly ones.

Networks usually publish PAYG roaming on a separate page from their main roaming page. If you're on pay as you go, make sure that's the one you're reading.

The three ways people get stung

The £0 spend cap, and where it actually works

There is a blunter way to avoid roaming charges than choosing the right network: set your spend cap to zero before you fly. On Three, Vodafone and Sky that blocks the daily roaming fee outright, so it cannot be triggered no matter what your phone does in your pocket. On O2 it does nothing of the sort, and EE doesn't say. Nobody puts these side by side, so here they are, each taken from that network's own page.

Two things before you do it. A £0 cap is not a discount — it is a wall, and on Three, Vodafone and Sky it means your phone genuinely will not work abroad beyond whatever your plan already includes. Sky's warning is worth reading twice: a cap that is simply too low for the trip stops you just as dead, so this can bite people who never set it to zero at all. If you need to be reachable, or to look up an address, that is the wrong tool. And caps are set per account rather than per trip, so it is easy to fly home and forget you left one on.

Where it earns its place is the accidental charge: the stopover that connects to a foreign mast, the phone that syncs mail before you have thought about it, the family member who does not want to think about any of this. Used that way it is the most reliable protection on this page, because it does not depend on anyone remembering to switch anything off.

Where to buy a travel eSIM

We may earn a commission if you buy through these links. It costs you nothing extra, and it doesn't change the order they appear in.

Network by network, side by side

Only networks we've checked against their own published prices appear here. We add a column each time we publish a network guide, rather than filling the table with figures lifted from other comparison sites.

O2 is the cheapest by a distance in Europe, because it still includes European roaming in the tariff rather than charging for it. A month in Spain costs an O2 customer nothing extra, against £42 on Vodafone, £48 on Three, £56 on Sky and £66 on EE. The trade-off is a 25GB roaming limit and no per-gigabyte overage — once you hit it, data stops until you buy a Bolt On.

Three and Sky share the cheapest daily rate at £2, undercutting EE and Vodafone by about 70p. Three is the more flexible for short trips: its 3-day pass at £5 is the only short pass any network sells, where EE starts at 7 days and £16.50 and Vodafone at 8 days and £16. Sky sells no passes at all, so a week costs a flat £14. Three's rate also depends on your contract date — joins from 18 December 2025 pay £2.75, level with Vodafone — while Sky's does not depend on anything except where you are going.

The long-trip picture is different again. Vodafone's 15-day pass at £21 is the cheapest fortnight of the four that charge, and a month in Europe costs £42 on Vodafone against £48 on Three, £56 on Sky and £66 on EE. Three wins the short trips and Vodafone the long ones, even though their daily rates are 75p apart — passes matter more than the headline rate, which is exactly why Sky, with the joint-lowest rate and no passes, drifts down the table the longer you stay.

The fair-use rules differ in kind, not just in size. Vodafone and Sky both apply a flat 25GB roaming cap, then charge per gigabyte beyond it — £3.84 at Vodafone and £2.50 at Sky. EE, O2 and Three all make their cap conditional: it only applies if your plan allowance is already larger, so on a smaller plan there is no separate roaming limit at all. The numbers therefore aren't comparable as headlines — on an unlimited plan a Three customer is capped at 12GB abroad, a Vodafone, O2 or Sky customer at 25GB, and an EE customer at 50GB. Three's cap is the tightest, but it is also the cheapest to exceed at 0.3p a megabyte. O2 differs again at the limit: there is no per-gigabyte overage at all, so data stops until you buy a Bolt On.

Four of the five limit how long you can roam, which almost nobody mentions. EE requires a stable link to the UK — two months here in any four-month period, or most of your usage at home. O2 allows 63 days abroad in four months before it treats it as unfair use, then charges £3.50 per gigabyte, 3.3p a minute and 1p a text. Vodafone charges past 62 days, or if your usage abroad exceeds your usage at home, with a text warning 14 days beforehand. Three is the outlier and the strictest: two complete months roaming in a rolling twelve, and it may suspend international roaming on your account altogether rather than bill you more. Sky is the exception: its tariff guide sets no days limit at all, though it keeps a separate fair usage policy covering extended use. If you winter abroad or work remotely from Europe, none of them is a way around it — and this matters far more than the daily rate does.

Beyond Europe the order reverses completely. Sky charges the same £2 in all 121 of its destinations, so Turkey, Andorra, the United States and Australia cost what Spain costs. Everyone else treats those as rest-of-world: £6 a day on EE, £7 on O2 and Three, £8 on Vodafone. For a fortnight in Turkey that is £28 on Sky against £112 on Vodafone. The catch is the edge — outside those 121 destinations Sky sells no pass at all, and data is billed by the megabyte.

Two caveats. These figures assume you're paying to roam at all — O2 includes European roaming on every tariff, some current Three plans include Go Roam, Sky Diamond VIP customers get it free, and plenty of EE and Vodafone plans include it too, in which case you pay nothing and none of this applies. And roaming charges are a poor reason on their own to change network: this is worth knowing at your next upgrade, not the week before you fly.

Network guides

A page per network, with its own rates, zones and quirks, built from what each network publishes itself. If you already know where you're going, the roaming charges by country table gives you all five networks' prices for that destination in one row.