Romania eSIM and SIM cards: what the plan table leaves out

The reason most of this page will not apply to you

Romania joined the EU roaming area along with everything else, so an EU or EEA contract works here on your domestic allowance. No purchase, no eSIM, no counter at Otopeni. If you are flying in from Milan, Madrid, Munich or Dublin, that is the end of your research.

British readers need to check their own plan rather than assume — EU roaming stopped being automatic for UK contracts and the operators went different ways on whether to charge for it. Non-European visitors are in the market properly, and Romania turns out to be a more interesting market than its neighbours.

The other case worth flagging is length of stay. Romania has become a common base for people working remotely for a season, and EU fair-use rules are not designed for that. If you are here for three months, the roaming answer quietly stops being the right one and a local prepaid SIM starts to look sensible.

The best network here is one no eSIM can sell you

This is the fact that makes Romania different from Poland or Hungary.

Romania has four operators. Orange Romania has the widest 5G footprint and the strongest national coverage, which is why it is the default recommendation. Vodafone Romania is strong in the cities and along the motorways. Telekom Romania is the fourth. And then there is Digi, which is excellent for data and is the country's budget option — Romania's genuinely cheap network.

Not one of the travel eSIM providers we track names a Romanian network. Airalo, Nomad, Saily and Holafly publish no host network for Romania, or for anywhere else — the Digi listing this page used to credit to Holafly came from our own data rather than from the seller — so you cannot know in advance which of the four operators you will land on. An earlier version of this page said they ride Orange or Vodafone. That was our inference rather than anything the sellers publish, and we should not have printed it as fact.

That does not make the eSIMs a bad deal. Romania has one of the better mobile infrastructures in Eastern Europe, and a visitor is unlikely to have a coverage problem in the places most visitors go. But it means the honest answer to "what is the cheapest way to get data in Romania" is probably not on our plan table, and we would rather say so than pretend the table is complete.

Driving Transylvania changes the answer

Romania is a driving country in a way Hungary and Bulgaria are not. Bucharest to Brasov to Sighisoara to Cluj is a road trip, and a large share of visitors do some version of it. That matters for two reasons.

First, Vodafone's strength is specifically described as cities and highways. If your route is the motorway network and the towns strung along it, Vodafone-based coverage is well suited to it. Orange's advantage is national breadth — better once you leave the main roads for the villages, the painted monasteries, the Carpathian passes.

Second, driving eats data in a way city walking does not. Turn-by-turn navigation running for four hours a day, live traffic, occasional rerouting: that is a materially heavier load than pulling up a metro map twice an afternoon. Anyone planning to drive should size their plan up a tier from whatever they would have bought for a city break.

Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca and Timisoara have excellent coverage and both Orange and Digi run strong 5G in the cities. The national average sits around 45 Mbps. Nothing about Romanian infrastructure should worry you; the question is only which parts of it your plan can reach.

Reading the price ladder

Airalo's Romanian rows were read from Airalo's own site on 13 August 2026, and Nomad's were read from nomadesim.com on 17 August 2026. The Saily and Holafly rows are indicative — the market's shape, not a quote.

An earlier version of this table carried Nomad prices nobody had checked, and they were wrong in both directions: $7 rather than $9 at 3 GB, $14 rather than $16 at 10 GB, and $22 rather than $20 at 20 GB. It also said Romania's metered ladder stopped at 20 GB. It does not. Nomad sells 50 GB over 30 days here for $45.

Nomad is the cheapest option at the two sizes most visitors buy, but not at every size. At 10 GB it is $16 against Airalo's $18 and Saily's $19.99; at 20 GB it is $20 against Airalo's $28, a 40% premium for the same allowance. At 5 GB the order reverses and Airalo's $11 undercuts Nomad's $12.50, and at 1 GB and 3 GB the three sellers are within a dollar of each other.

The 50 GB row is the one that changes how Romania reads. At $45 for 30 days it works out at $0.90 a gigabyte — the only sub-dollar rate in the country, against a best of $1.35 from Airalo's 20 GB over 15 days. If your stay is long or there are several of you sharing a hotspot, it is the cheapest data Romania sells, from a counter or otherwise.

Airalo is the better of the two verified-and-cheap options at matched sizes: $11 against Saily's $12.99 at 5 GB, $18 against $19.99 at 10 GB, on prices we actually read. Airalo does not sell a 30-day 3 GB plan here at all — its 3 GB runs three or seven days, at $7.50 and $8 — so the small end of the ladder is Saily and Nomad territory.

Holafly's unlimited plans run $19 for five days, $36.90 for ten and $68.90 for twenty-five; Airalo's verified unlimited undercuts it at $18.50 for five days and $34.50 for ten, and Nomad's verified unlimited undercuts both at $18 for five days, $25 for seven and $33 for ten. On a ten-day trip that is $33 to $36.90 against $16 for 10 GB of capped data. Unlimited is worth paying for when you cannot predict usage. On a normal Transylvania road trip you can.

The airport counter costs more here

A Romanian prepaid SIM at the airport typically runs about $13. That is high — Poland and Hungary sit around $8 — and it is the sort of gap that makes the arrivals-hall purchase harder to justify. Add the passport registration requirement, which Romania enforces for prepaid activation, and you are looking at a form, a counter and a queue to pay more than a well-chosen eSIM costs.

There is one situation where it still wins. If you want Digi, the counter is the only route, and Digi's reputation as the value network in Romania is the reason someone might want it. For a longer stay, walking into a Digi shop in Bucharest rather than buying at the airport is likely to be cheaper still.

Our call

EU or EEA contract, holiday length: buy nothing.

Everyone else, city trip of a week or so: Nomad's 10 GB at $16, now a price read off Nomad's own store rather than an inherited guess. Airalo's 10 GB / 30 days at $18 is two dollars more and equally well checked; either is a defensible buy.

Driving Transylvania for two weeks or more: Nomad's 20 GB / 30 days at $20, verified, at $1.00 a gigabyte. Navigation is hungry, and Airalo's 20 GB / 30 days at $28 is eight dollars more for the same allowance. If you would rather not think about it again, Nomad's 50 GB at $45 is the cheapest rate in the country and hard to exhaust.

Staying a month or longer: seriously consider a Digi SIM bought locally. It is the one thing the eSIM market cannot give you, and for a long stay the arithmetic probably favours it — though we cannot put a number on that from the data we hold, and we will not invent one.

Our cheapest eSIM comparison ranks providers on cost per gigabyte across all the countries we cover, and how we test sets out what a verified price means on this site.