Buying a SIM card at Stockholm Arlanda (ARN)

A single kiosk, and a thin shelf

Stockholm Arlanda has one place to buy a SIM card on arrival: a Lycamobile kiosk, carrying a limited set of plans. There is no Telia, Tele2 or Telenor counter, no competing kiosk, and nothing sold as an eSIM.

One seller with a short range is a weak position to negotiate from. You take what is on the shelf. We do not hold the kiosk's terminal location or its opening hours — Arlanda is a multi-terminal airport and a kiosk in one arrivals hall does you no good if you land at another — so do not build a plan around reaching it.

We also hold nothing on which host network Lycamobile uses in Sweden. It is an MVNO, so it rides on somebody's towers, but we have not confirmed whose and will not guess.

Bring your passport

Sweden requires ID to buy a prepaid SIM. Registration has been mandatory since August 2022, and it applies at the kiosk here as it does at a carrier store in the city.

This page previously flagged a contradiction: our Swedish country record said no ID was required, while the Arlanda and Landvetter source material said a passport was. We have now resolved it in favour of the passport and corrected the country record. The no-ID line was boilerplate that predated the registration rule; the airport records name the change and date it. If you were counting on an anonymous cash purchase, do not.

Queues at the kiosk run about 10 minutes at peak and roughly 3 minutes off-peak. Free wi-fi is generally available across the terminal, which is enough to activate an eSIM or sort out a train into Stockholm before you leave the building.

Most arrivals at Arlanda should buy nothing

Sweden is in the EU. If your everyday SIM is from any EU or EEA country, roam-like-at-home applies — your normal allowance works here at your normal price, with no purchase at all. Given how much of Arlanda's traffic is intra-European and Nordic, that is the correct answer for a large share of the people reading this. Check your operator's roaming fair-use cap and skip the kiosk.

Everything below is for arrivals from outside the EU and EEA.

Swedish data prices, top of the ladder first

Sweden is not a cheap market at the small end, but it does not stop at 20GB the way Romania does. There is a 50GB tier, and it is where the value is.

The 50GB tier is roughly five times better value per gigabyte than the 1GB starter plans. Airalo's is verified at $42, read from its own site on 13 August 2026. An earlier version of this page said Nomad's row would be cheaper still; that price had never been read at source, and now that it has been, it is $45 — dearer than Airalo for the same size.

A Swedish prepaid SIM costs around $10 at airport prices. That is genuinely competitive against the 5GB eSIM tier, and it is the reason the Lycamobile kiosk is not an outrage. The catch is that you do not know the allowance until you are standing at it, and there is no second seller to walk to.

Which network you end up on

Holafly lists no carrier for Sweden. The Telia, Tele2 and Telenor trio this page used to show against it came from our own data rather than from the seller, so there is nothing here to decide your purchase. Saily, Nomad and Airalo publish no host network for Sweden either — Airalo's Swedish product is sold under the name Vän, which is a retail label, not a carrier.

This matters more in Sweden than in most of Europe, because the country is long and thinly populated and coverage away from the southern cities is not uniform. If you are heading north, the only way to know whose towers you are on is a physical SIM from Telia, Tele2, Telenor Sweden or Three, bought in the city.

The verdict

Install an eSIM before you fly, and buy at the 50GB tier if the trip is longer than a weekend. Arlanda's single kiosk is a fallback, not a plan — acceptable if your phone cannot take an eSIM, pointless otherwise. Full Swedish pricing and the local-versus-eSIM comparison are on the Sweden hub.