Buying a SIM card at Munich Airport (MUC)

Start with the question of whether you need to buy anything

Germany is in the EU, and roam-like-at-home applies. If your phone plan was bought anywhere in the EU or EEA — Ireland, Spain, Poland, Norway, Iceland — it works in Bavaria at your normal domestic allowance and your normal domestic price. There is nothing to buy at Munich Airport, nothing to set up, and no counter to find. That covers a large share of the people landing at MUC, and it is the honest answer for them.

The rest of this page is for everyone else: arrivals from the UK, the US, Australia, Asia and anywhere else outside the roaming zone.

What is actually in the terminals

Telekom and O2 both run shops in Terminal 2 arrivals. The queue is typically around ten minutes, which is genuinely better than Frankfurt — Munich's arrivals hall is calmer and the counters are not the bottleneck they are elsewhere.

For Terminal 1 we hold nothing. We have no record of a carrier shop, its location or its hours there, and rather than describe a generic "electronics store in arrivals" we would rather say plainly that we do not know. If you land in T1 and want a physical SIM, assume you may have to walk over to T2 or wait until you are in the city.

We also do not hold opening hours for either shop. Early and late arrivals should not count on a counter being staffed.

Germany requires a passport or national ID to register a prepaid SIM, so buying at a counter means handing over your documents and waiting for the registration to go through. That is part of why the ten minutes is ten minutes and not two.

Is buying there a good idea?

Usually not. Our country data puts a typical German airport SIM at around $15, and at that price the counter is not being outrageous — but you are paying for a registration process you have to stand in line for, in a country where the alternative is a QR code you can scan on the plane.

Airalo's German plans, sold under the retail name Hallo! Mobil, were the first we checked directly on the seller's own site. These are those prices:

That 50 GB plan at $36 is worth noticing before you assume small is cheap. At $0.72 per gigabyte it is the second-best rate in our German data behind Nomad's verified 50 GB at $32, or $0.64. Germany is not an expensive market; the expensive part is buying in 1 GB slices.

Saily, Nomad and Holafly also sell German plans, and Saily's have now been read off its own site as well: 1 GB for 7 days at $4.49, 3 GB for 30 days at $8.99, 5 GB for 30 days at $10.99, 10 GB for 30 days at $16.99 and 20 GB for 30 days at $22.99. Nomad's German prices have now been read off its own site too: 1 GB for 7 days at $4.50, 3 GB for 30 days at $8, 5 GB at $10, 10 GB at $14, 20 GB at $21 and 50 GB at $32. Nothing undercuts Airalo at the small end — its $4.00 for 1 GB is the cheapest entry into Germany, though it buys three days against the seven Saily and Nomad give. Above that, Nomad wins every size: $10 against Saily's $10.99 at 5 GB, $14 against Airalo's $16 at 10 GB, $21 against Saily's $22.99 at 20 GB, and $32 against Airalo's $36 at 50 GB. An earlier version of this page called Nomad's German figures indicative and put its 20 GB month at $28; checked, it is $21. Only Holafly's listings remain unconfirmed; eSIMCard's rows were withdrawn on 18 August 2026 after we read its site and found ours wrong. Our data also carries eSIM Go rows for Germany, and they are not comparable to any of the above: eSIM Go sells wholesale to resellers and publishes no consumer price — checked on esim-go.com on 18 August 2026, where there is no basket, no checkout and no per-country page — so its rows cannot be bought or ever verified. See our eSIM Go page. The full ladder is on our Germany hub.

The Bavarian Alps point, and its limit

If your trip runs out of the city — Neuschwanstein, the Zugspitze, Berchtesgaden — network choice starts to matter in a way it does not in central Munich, where everything works. Deutsche Telekom is generally regarded as the strongest of the German networks in rural and alpine terrain.

Here is the catch, and it is the reason this page cannot simply tell you to buy a "Telekom eSIM". At a Telekom shop in Terminal 2 you know exactly which network you are on, because you are buying from the operator itself. With a travel eSIM you do not. Our data used to list Telekom against eSIM Go and Holafly, and both entries came from this site's own generated text rather than from the sellers — Holafly names no carrier for any country, and eSIM Go has no consumer page on which it could. Airalo, Saily, Nomad and eSIMCard do not publish a host network for Germany at all; an earlier version of this page put Nomad in the first group, which was an error in our data.

So if alpine coverage is the deciding factor for your trip, the airport counter is the one place where you can be certain what you are getting. That is a narrow case, but it is a real one, and it is the only argument for the Terminal 2 shops that survives scrutiny.

Getting out of the airport

The S1 and S8 both run from the airport to München Hauptbahnhof in about 40 minutes. The Lufthansa Airport Bus takes roughly 45 minutes to the Munich City Air Terminal. Both are underground or on rails for much of the route, so if you are activating an eSIM, do it before you leave the terminal rather than halfway to the city.