Buying a SIM card at Brussels Airport

Three counters, and a hard stop at eight in the evening

Brussels Airport arrivals has counters for Proximus, Orange Belgium and Base / Telenet Mobile — better carrier representation than any UK airport we cover, where the sellers are newsagents and bureaux de change.

The catch is on the clock. Those counters close at 20:00. Evening and night arrivals find nothing open, and Brussels takes plenty of both. There is no 24-hour vending fallback on our record, so a 22:00 landing means arriving without a Belgian SIM and sorting it in the city the next day, or arriving with an eSIM already installed.

One more thing the counters do not do: sell eSIMs. Our record is explicit that it is physical SIM only at the airport. If your phone has no SIM tray, the counters are not an option even during opening hours.

The queue is paperwork, not people

Fifteen minutes at peak, five off-peak. Belgium requires ID for SIM registration, so you will be handing over a passport and waiting while details are entered. That is what makes a Belgian airport queue longer than a British one — Heathrow's 8 to 10 minutes covers no registration at all, because the UK asks for nothing.

Budget for the paperwork if you decide to buy here. Our country record puts a typical Belgian airport SIM at about $12.

Most EU arrivals should walk past all of it

Belgium is in the EU. If you are flying in from another EU or EEA country, roam-like-at-home means your existing bundle works in Belgium at domestic rates, and the correct amount to spend at Brussels Airport is nothing. No queue, no passport, no 20:00 deadline.

That covers a large share of arrivals at a hub like this one. The rest of this page is for everyone else — arrivals from the UK, the US, Asia, anywhere outside the roaming zone — plus EU travellers whose bundle has a fair-use data cap they expect to blow through.

What the eSIMs cost

These prices were read from the providers' own Belgian checkouts on 13 August 2026, in US dollars.

Belgium is a cheap market by European standards, and the cheapest verified gigabyte is at the top of the ladder: $0.65 on Airalo's 50 GB plan. An earlier version of this page said Nomad listed that size for $29, which would have been $0.58 a gigabyte. That figure was wrong — Nomad charges $45 for the same allowance, or $0.90 a gigabyte — and nothing in Belgium undercuts the $0.65.

Airalo sells Belgium under two named tiers, Belganet and Belganet+, with a second price at every size — 50 GB is $42.00 as Belganet+ against $32.50 as Belganet. What the plus tier adds is not stated at checkout. We are not going to guess, and neither should the comparison you make at the counter.

Which network you end up on, honestly

An earlier version of this site's Belgian pages said every travel eSIM in Belgium rides Proximus or Orange. That was not true, and it has gone.

Here is what we actually hold. Airalo, Saily and Nomad publish no host network for Belgium at all — Belganet is Airalo's own product name, not a carrier, and the Proximus and Orange attribution this page used to carry against two Nomad plans came from generated text rather than from Nomad. Holafly names nothing either. This page used to give it Proximus, Orange and Base, which came from our own data; Holafly publishes no host carrier for any country — we read its prices for 28 of them off esim.holafly.com on 18 August 2026 and not one names an operator.

The counters in arrivals are the one place where you know exactly what you are getting, because you are buying from the operator itself. That is the honest argument for the queue, and it is a better one than price.

The verdict for Brussels

If you are an EU arrival, buy nothing. If you land after 20:00, you cannot buy here anyway. If you land during the day, need a Belgian number specifically, or want a named network, the counters are worth the 15 minutes and the passport.

Everyone else is better off installing an eSIM before departure — cheaper per gigabyte, no registration, and immune to the closing time. Free wi-fi runs through the airport, so you can also do it after landing if you forget. Full prices are on our Belgium hub.