Travel eSIM Statistics 2026 — Every Number Sourced, Dated and Reconciled

Travel eSIM Statistics 2026 — Every Number Sourced, Dated and Reconciled

Updated August 2026 · Written by a company that sells travel eSIMs — which is exactly why nothing below rests on our say-so

A survey percentage, a network measurement and a vendor's marketing claim measure different things, yet they are often quoted side by side as if interchangeable. This page is duller and more useful: every figure below is dated, attributed to a named source — linked where the source is fetchable — and labelled with what it actually measures. Where credible sources disagree, both versions appear, with the reason for the gap.

How many people actually use travel eSIMs?

Three credible organisations have put a number on this in the past eighteen months, disagreeing at first glance by a factor of four. All three are defensible. They measure different things.

Opensignal's July 2026 "Travel eSIM Reality Check" reportedly found travel eSIM users in its global user base nearly doubling year on year, from 1.7% in Q2 2025 to 3.3% in Q2 2026 — long-haul travellers reportedly 2.5 times likelier to use one. A caution we owe you: Opensignal's page would not load for our tools, so these figures rest on repeated search-index excerpts, not a full copy — treat them as reported, not verified. The denominator also matters: this is a share of Opensignal's entire measurement base, traveller or not, which is one reason it is small.

Ookla's Q2 2026 Speedtest data, reported by TelecomLead on 12 August 2026, uses a different base: travel eSIMs' measured share of roaming rose from 2.7% to 3.4% in the twelve months to June 2026, while overall international roaming grew 12%. Share of roaming and share of all users are different denominators; both can be true at once.

GSMA Intelligence's Consumer Survey (17 March 2026) asks people instead of measuring devices: across 11 major countries, 12% of consumers who took an international trip in the previous 12 months used an eSIM while abroad. Two things square this with the small network-measured shares. The survey base is travellers only. And — the concession that matters most, coming from us — more than 70% of those eSIM users used a telco's own eSIM service, not a non-telco travel eSIM brand. Run the arithmetic (ours, not GSMA's): fewer than four in a hundred surveyed travellers bought from the industry this store belongs to. Any page quoting a dramatically higher "adoption" figure is measuring something else.

Market size and money

The most-quoted user figure is Juniper Research's 2024 forecast: 40 million travel eSIM users growing to over 215 million by 2028 — the widely quoted "+440%" — a projection that dates from 2024, which is worth remembering when it appears under fresher headlines. A second Juniper release, in 2025, forecast travel eSIM package revenue reaching $1.8 billion by the end of 2025, up 85% from $989 million in 2024; the same firm put roaming data at $8.57 per GB in 2024 against $5.50 on travel eSIMs, and predicted operators would lose over $11 billion to them.

Kaleido Intelligence, in an August 2024 release, projected retail spending on travel eSIM services at $3.3 billion by 2025 — a near-165% increase on 2023 — with average spend below $15 per trip, and travel eSIM approaching 28% of total travel-connectivity retail spending in 2028.

$1.8 billion and $3.3 billion for the same year is exactly the kind of gap this page exists to flag. Both are advance forecasts by different firms with different scopes — "package revenue" is not "retail spending" — and neither has published a reconciliation. The defensible summary: a low-single-digit-billion-dollar retail market in 2025, per two forecasts that disagree on the digit. The sub-$15 average spend also explains why the arrivals-hall counter survives; we weigh both honestly in airport SIM vs travel eSIM.

The device base: how many phones can even hold one

Usage shares only make sense against the hardware that can take an eSIM at all. Whether your phone qualifies is covered in our eSIM-compatible phones list; the industry-level numbers look like this:

For scale: GSMA's Mobile Economy 2026 counts 8.8 billion wireless connections but only 5.8 billion unique subscribers — about 70% of the global population — because many people carry several SIMs; the ITU counts 9.2 billion mobile subscriptions in 2025, more than one per person alive. Connections, subscriptions and subscribers are three different units — exactly why any "eSIM adoption" percentage needs a stated denominator. Into that base flow roughly 1.26 billion new smartphones a year (IDC tracker data for 2025, via trade press).

The direction is not in dispute. The table's shipment figures come from the Trusted Connectivity Alliance — the SIM industry's own body, which also reports consumer eSIM profile downloads up 43% in 2025 — plus ABI Research (smartphones were 74% of 2025's eSIM-enabled shipments) and Counterpoint Research, which expects nearly 70% of all cellular devices shipped to be eSIM- or iSIM-capable by 2030. GSMA forecasts eSIM at 42% of all SIM technologies by 2030, and GSMA Intelligence's Q1 2026 tracker expects consumer eSIM penetration to double in 2026 and again in 2027. Yet plastic SIMs still outsold eSIMs almost six to one in 2025. eSIM is winning; it has not yet won.

The supply chain rarely explained to consumers

The structural fact almost no consumer page states: many retail travel eSIM brands do not operate networks. They are white-label resellers of a few wholesale platforms — a structure the platforms describe openly; every claim in this section comes from their own public pages, accessed August 2026.

Telna, per its own June 2026 press release (carried by The Fast Mode), distributes more than five million eSIMs a month and carries close to 5% of global roaming traffic; in February 2026 it launched a $100 million investment fund for travel eSIM brands, per TelcoNews UK. 1GLOBAL's own "Telco as a Service" page invites businesses to "Embed Telco as a White Label Solution", citing 200+ roaming destinations and 600+ roaming agreements; its May 2025 boilerplate reports over 43 million connected devices. eSIM Access, linked to RedteaGO, titles its own site "eSIM Reseller Platform" and markets a white-label API; its pages would not load for our tools in August 2026, so beyond that self-description we quote nothing further. And Monty Mobile's newsroom (July 2026) spells out the economics: resellers purchase capacity at wholesale rates and set retail prices independently, with "no mandatory markups and no price floors".

The consequence: when brands sit on shared wholesale rails, coverage maps and underlying networks are often similar from logo to logo — and so is the routing, documented in where travel eSIMs actually exit to the internet. What genuinely differs is app, support, price and, above all, fair-use policy — compared clause by clause, from providers' own pages, in our fair-use policy comparison.

Vendor-published reports

One source type gets a note, not a citation. Holafly's 2026 Summer Travel Report (its own site, June 2026) headlines that 85.4% of respondents planned or had already taken summer travel and that eSIM adoption rose from 19% to 27.4% year on year. When we read the page on 22 August 2026, it framed these as survey results but published no sample size, no fieldwork dates, no respondent countries and no collection method. That does not make the numbers wrong; it makes them impossible to weigh — which is why this page is built from analyst houses and industry bodies instead, and why we would hold any survey of our own to the same standard.

The environmental numbers, briefly

These have their own sourced pages; the short version, dated: the plastic SIM market was still 3.5 billion units in 2025 (TCA, March 2026); a SIM in its card carrier weighs about 4 grams, and at the roughly 4.5 billion cards then made each year that put the industry's plastic use near 20,000 tonnes (Thales figures, 2022); by 2025, 45% of member-reported SIM volumes had moved to half-size carriers. The world generated 62 million tonnes of e-waste in 2022, only 22.3% documented as properly collected and recycled (UN Global E-waste Monitor 2024). The long versions live in how many SIM cards are made each year and our eSIM environmental impact page.

Pricing: use our dataset, not our adjectives

Per-gigabyte figures go stale — the $5.50 above is Juniper's 2024 average, not today's market. Instead of repeating other people's numbers, our dated, per-destination dataset lives in the eSIM Price Index 2026. For our own store: plans from $3.90, 10 GB for $8.90 in most countries, delivered by email and installed before you fly.

Frequently asked

How many people use travel eSIMs in 2026?

There is no single number. Per GSMA Intelligence (March 2026), 12% of international travellers across 11 countries used an eSIM abroad in the past year — and more than 70% of those used their own operator's eSIM, not a travel eSIM brand. Network measurements put travel eSIMs at low single-digit shares: a measured 3.4% of roaming (Ookla Q2 2026) and reportedly 3.3% of Opensignal's user base.

How big is the travel eSIM market in money terms?

Two independent forecasts for 2025: $1.8 billion in data-package revenue (Juniper Research, 2025 release) and $3.3 billion in retail spending (Kaleido Intelligence, 2024 release). The scopes differ, and neither figure is a measured result — both are forecasts; low single-digit billions is the defensible summary.

How fast is the travel eSIM market growing?

Juniper Research forecast users growing from 40 million in 2024 to over 215 million by 2028, and package revenue up 85% into 2025. Measured: travel eSIMs' share of roaming rose from 2.7% to 3.4% in the year to June 2026 (Ookla data via TelecomLead).

Do all travel eSIM brands use the same networks?

Often, though not always: several wholesale platforms — Telna, 1GLOBAL and eSIM Access — market white-label eSIM reselling on their own pages, so different brands can sit on the same underlying supply. Where they do, coverage is similar; the real differences are app, support, price and fair-use policy.

How many eSIMs ship each year compared with plastic SIMs?

605 million eSIMs shipped in 2025 against a 3.5-billion-unit traditional SIM market, per the Trusted Connectivity Alliance — eSIM grew 18% year on year but remains the minority format.

Can I reuse the statistics on this page?

You are welcome to cite this page with a link and credit to AeroSims. The underlying figures belong to their original publishers, so cite them too.

All third-party figures were checked against the linked sources in August 2026; where a primary page could not be fetched, the text says so. Company figures (Telna, 1GLOBAL, eSIM Access, Monty Mobile, Holafly) are their own published claims as accessed August 2026. Policies and rules change; this page reflects the linked sources as of August 2026. AeroSims prices checked August 2026 and subject to change.