The short answer
There are only three ways a home carrier bills you for using your phone abroad: a daily pass, an inclusive allowance, or a per-megabyte rate. Which one you are on decides what the trip costs far more than the headline number does — a cheap daily pass on a three-week trip beats an expensive one on a weekend every time.
So this page states the modeleach carrier uses, which is structural and changes rarely, and links you to that carrier’s own page for the current figure. We deliberately do not reprint their prices. Roaming tariffs are revised without notice, vary by plan generation and destination zone, and differ between prepaid and contract — a number copied here would be wrong for some readers immediately and for everyone eventually.
Rates change. Check your carrier’s own page before you travel. The models and links below were last verified on 21 September 2026. If a link has moved since, search your carrier’s site for “roaming” rather than trusting a price from anywhere else — including us.
The three charging models
Everything in the table further down is one of these. Learn the three and you can read any carrier’s roaming page in about a minute.
- Daily pass. A flat fee for every calendar day the line is used abroad. It usually triggers on any use at all — one notification is a full day — and renews itself for as long as the trip lasts.
- Inclusive, capped. Your home allowance travels with you, but only to a named list of countries and only up to a fair-use cap. Both the list and the cap are the fine print that matters.
- Per megabyte. Metered per megabyte, with no pass or allowance in front of it. This is the rate behind the cap and outside the list, and it is the one that produces the headline-grabbing bills.
Most carriers use more than one: a daily pass for long-haul, an inclusive zone closer to home, and the per-megabyte rate quietly waiting behind both. The model listed below is the headline arrangement for an ordinary consumer contract, with the exceptions noted beside it.
How each carrier bills you
Grouped by the market the contract is bought in, because that is what determines your rights — not where you are going. Every “current rates” link goes to the carrier’s own page.
United States
| Carrier | Charged by | How it works | Current rates |
|---|---|---|---|
| Verizon | Daily pass | TravelPass adds a flat daily charge on each day the line is used abroad, and unlocks your home allowance for that day. Mexico and Canada are treated separately from the rest of the world. | Verizon |
| AT&T | Daily pass | The International Day Pass bills per 24-hour period of use, with a reduced rate for additional lines on the same account. Monthly packages exist for longer trips. | AT&T |
| T-Mobile | Inclusive, capped | Eligible postpaid plans include data and texting in a long list of destinations, with a high-speed allowance and reduced speeds after it. Passes buy back full speed; the entitlement assumes you primarily use the phone in the US. | T-Mobile |
United Kingdom
| Carrier | Charged by | How it works | Current rates |
|---|---|---|---|
| EE | Daily pass | Pay-monthly plans taken since roaming charges returned carry a daily fee to use UK allowances in Europe, charged only on days the phone is used. A monthly roaming pass is the alternative on eligible plans. | EE |
| O2 | Inclusive, capped | Europe is drawn from the home allowance up to a fair-use data cap. Beyond Europe, an opt-in travel bolt-on behaves as a daily pass, and some plans include named non-European destinations. | O2 |
| Vodafone UK | Daily pass | Global Roaming charges a daily rate by destination zone, with Europe cheaper than the rest of the world. Some plan tiers include the European zone outright. | Vodafone UK |
| Three | Daily pass | Go Roam on newer plans is a daily charge, or a multi-day pass bought up front, and carries a monthly fair-use data cap per destination. Older contracts are on legacy inclusive terms; Ireland is free of charge. | Three |
European Union
| Carrier | Charged by | How it works | Current rates |
|---|---|---|---|
| Telekom Germany | Inclusive, capped | EU and EEA roaming comes out of the domestic allowance under roam-like-at-home. Outside the EU you are on zone-based travel options or metered rates, which is where German travellers to Turkey, the UK and the Balkans get caught. | Telekom |
| Orange France | Inclusive, capped | Calls, texts and data work as at home across the EU zone and the DROM. Elsewhere you buy a fixed-duration international pass, or you are metered — Orange caps runaway data spend with a bill alert and a hard block. | Orange |
| Vodafone Spain | Inclusive, capped | Inclusive across the EU zone with a fair-use data limit; the rest of the world is split into tariff zones with their own bundles. Check which zone your destination sits in before you fly, not after. | Vodafone |
Canada
| Carrier | Charged by | How it works | Current rates |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rogers | Daily pass | Roam Like Home charges a flat daily rate — one rate for the US, a higher one for the rest of the world — on any day the line is used, and lends you your home allowance for it. | Rogers |
| Bell | Daily pass | Roam Better bills per day of use, split between the US and international destinations, and is not available on prepaid or on plans that already include roaming. | Bell |
| Telus | Daily pass | Easy Roam is a per-day charge on days you use data, with fixed-length travel passes for longer trips and roaming folded into some higher plan tiers. | Telus |
Australia
| Carrier | Charged by | How it works | Current rates |
|---|---|---|---|
| Telstra | Daily pass | International Roaming day passes bundle a data allowance per day, with excess data charged on top once the bundle is used. Passes auto-renew each day you keep roaming. | Telstra |
| Optus | Daily pass | Roaming add-ons are sold per day or as multi-day packs by destination zone, with separate arrangements for prepaid. Some postpaid plans include a standing daily roaming entitlement. | Optus |
| Vodafone | Daily pass | Global Roaming charges a daily rate that lets you use your Australian inclusions in the covered destinations; countries outside that list fall back to metered rates. | Vodafone |
The pattern is hard to miss. Travel from the United States, Canada, Australia or the United Kingdom and you are almost certainly buying days. Travel within the EU on an EU contract and you are almost certainly using your own allowance, because the roam-like-at-home rules require it. Leave that bloc and the EU contract starts buying days too.
Where the money actually goes
Nobody is surprised by the advertised rate. People are surprised by four mechanics, and all four are in the terms rather than the headline.
- The pass triggers on any use, and bills the whole day. A single background sync as the plane doors open costs the same as a day of heavy use. This is also why a day of careful Wi-Fi discipline can still appear on the bill: the charge attached the moment the phone registered on the local network.
- Passes renew themselves. The decision to buy is made once; the decision to keep buying is made for you, every day, until you come home. A trip that runs two days long costs two days more with nobody agreeing to it.
- “Europe” is not Europe. Inclusive allowances cover a named list, and the omissions are exactly the places people go: Switzerland, Turkey, Albania, Serbia, Bosnia, Montenegro. One night over a border can be charged at the long-haul rate while the rest of the trip is free.
- The fair-use cap has a rate behind it.Inclusive roaming is capped, and past the cap you either slow to something unusable or start paying per megabyte. Per-megabyte is the dearest rail on any carrier’s sheet, and it is the one you fall onto without being asked.
The one setting worth knowing: data roaming offon your home line. Not aeroplane mode, which also kills calls and texts, and not “I’ll just use Wi-Fi”, which does not stop the phone registering. Off means off, and it is what makes the arithmetic in the next section optional.
What it comes to on a trip
We will not quote your carrier’s price, but the shape of the bill is worth stating. As a typical range rather than any carrier’s actual rate, long-haul daily passes from the US, UK, Canadian and Australian markets tend to land around €10–15 per day. Regional or European-zone passes sit meaningfully below that band; per-megabyte rates outside any pass sit far above it.
Multiply the band by the days your phone will be on and you have the real comparison. A long weekend is a modest number. A fortnight is not, and a month is the kind of number that gets a plan cancelled when the bill arrives. The cost scales with the calendar, which is the single most important property of the daily-pass model: it is indifferent to whether you used the phone for navigation or for nothing at all.
For the same arithmetic worked through against live plan prices — including the cases where roaming is genuinely the better buy — see eSIM vs roaming.
Checking your own contract
- Open your carrier’s roaming page from the table above and find the current rate for your destination. Rates are quoted by zone, so check which zone the country sits in rather than assuming.
- Confirm the rate applies to your plan. Carriers commonly run different roaming terms for contracts sold before and after a given date, and the page shows the newest terms by default.
- If you have an inclusive allowance, read the country list and the fair-use cap — both, not one. The list decides whether you pay at all; the cap decides what happens in week two.
- Multiply the daily rate by the number of days the phone will be switched on, not the number of days you expect to use it. Those are the same number in practice.
- Compare that against a plan for the same trip on the destination page, or let the trip planner price a multi-stop route.
The alternatives
Once you know your model, the options are short. If you are on an inclusive allowance that covers your destination and your trip is shorter than the fair-use cap, you are already paid up; do nothing. If you are on a daily pass for more than a night or two, or on per-megabyte rates at all, the sensible move is to stop buying days and buy data instead.
A travel eSIM installs as a second line beside your existing SIM, so your own number stays live for calls and SMS — including the two-factor codes that catch out anyone who swaps their SIM for a local one — while data runs over the eSIM at a price set per gigabyte instead of per day. The installation guide covers the settings, including turning data roaming off on the home line, which is the step that stops both bills arriving at once.
Worth checking first that your handset supports eSIM and how much data your trip actually needs — buying a size too small is the one way to make an eSIM cost more than it should.
Price it properly: eSIM plans by country, or jump to a size — 5GB, 10GB or unlimited. And whatever you decide, check your carrier’s own roaming page before you fly: the figures on it are the only ones that are current.