What will roaming cost on my trip?
Cost a trip from your own contract’s rates: a daily pass against pay-as-you-go, the break-even, the worst case, and what to set up before you leave.
Enter how many days you are away and roughly how much data you expect to use. Then add whichever rates your contract quotes.
Not enough to say anything yet
Low — this is a starting point, not a finding. More information would change it.
Nothing has been entered that can be turned into an answer. Every tool here works from figures you supply, and none of them will guess on your behalf.
Before you leave
Turn off automatic photo and video backup
Set it to Wi-Fi only before you go. A phone quietly uploading holiday video over a metered network is the most common cause of a roaming bill that shocks people.
Check what your allowance actually covers there
Roaming inclusions differ by destination and by tariff, and having used a plan abroad before does not mean the same terms still apply.
Find the fair-use cap, not just the word "unlimited"
Passes sold as unlimited almost always stop being unlimited at a stated number of gigabytes.
Set a data warning or cap on the phone
Both Android and iOS can warn at a set amount of mobile data. It is the last line of defence and it is free.
Download maps, music and anything else offline
Offline maps in particular remove the activity most likely to run while you are out and about.
Check whether a pass has to be activated
Some are automatic on arrival, some are not, and being charged out-of-bundle rates for a day because the pass was not switched on is a common and expensive surprise.
What to try, all free
Look up what you actually used
Both Android and iOS keep a running total of mobile data, and your network shows the last few months in its app. That record beats every estimate on this page — use this tool to sanity-check it, not to replace it.
- Do it now
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Worked out by mobile rules 1.0.0. Nothing you entered leaves your browser.
Why you enter the rates yourself
Because a table of current roaming charges is the most dangerous thing a page like this could contain. The rates change without notice. They differ between tariffs sold by the same network. They differ by destination within what the network calls one zone. And a reader who trusts a figure that went stale six months ago finds out about it at the airport.
The numbers that matter are on your own contract, and the useful thing to do with them is the arithmetic nobody does in their head. That is what this page is for.
A pass or pay-as-you-go: it is one number
A daily pass is a fixed cost per day whether you use it or not. Out-of-bundle charging costs nothing until you use data and then costs a great deal. There is a single amount of data at which the two come out level, and knowing which side of it your trip falls on is the whole decision.
Below the break-even, a pass is money for nothing. Above it, out-of-bundle charging gets expensive fast. This tool solves for that figure rather than making you guess at it.
The Wi-Fi you are counting on
Most people plan around hotel or café Wi-Fi and a good share of them find it unusable when they arrive. So this page asks what proportion of your data you expect to do on Wi-Fi, uses it for the expected cost, and separately shows you what happens if none of it materialises.
That second figure is the one worth knowing before you leave. It is also usually the reason a pass turns out to have been worth buying.
“Unlimited” has a number in it
Passes sold as unlimited almost always carry a fair-use cap, stated in gigabytes somewhere in the terms, beyond which normal charges resume. If you are relying on a pass for a long trip or for tethering a laptop, that cap is the figure that decides your bill, not the word on the advert.
The single most expensive mistake
A phone quietly uploading a week of holiday video over a metered foreign network. It is the most common cause of a roaming bill that shocks people, it happens without any deliberate action, and it is prevented by one setting changed before you leave.
The checklist in the result covers that and the others — a data cap set on the phone, offline maps downloaded, and confirming whether your pass has to be activated rather than starting on its own. All of them are free and all of them are easier at home.
Where you are going stays with you
This page asks for a broad region rather than a country, and never asks for dates. It does not need them to do the arithmetic, and a record of where somebody is going and when is a record of when their home is empty.
If you are trying to work out how much data you are likely to use in the first place, the mobile data calculatorestimates it from what you actually do — though a holiday month rarely looks like a normal one.