AMERICAN eSIM & Roaming Statistics 2026
Sourced, citable figures on travel eSIM pricing, coverage, and real-world speed across Americas. Updated quarterly. Open data, CC BY 4.0.
Cost of mobile data by market
Unlimited plans, decoded
Of 44 "unlimited data" eSIM plans surveyed across 18 resellers, 27% publish no quota figure at all before purchase.
Among plans that do disclose a limit, the median daily quota before throttling is 3 GB/day.
Once the quota is used up, throttled speed ranges from 128 kbps to 2 Mbps, with 1 Mbps as the typical value: enough for messaging, rarely for video.
Device compatibility
Weighting each region's smartphone market against official manufacturer eSIM device lists puts North America at an estimated 76.3 to 82.2%, the highest compatibility of any region we track.
South America lands at an estimated 44.2 to 57.7%, in line with our own Mexican study (50 to 60%): a gap of roughly 18.6 to 38 percentage points between the two halves of the continent.
Since the iPhone 14 (2022), Apple has sold no US model with a physical SIM tray at all: in the United States, eSIM is not an option, it is the only one.
The wider eSIM market
By late 2025, only 5% of smartphone connections actively used an eSIM, a share expected to reach 10% by the end of 2026 and to overtake the physical SIM before 2030.
Consumer awareness of eSIM rose from 25% to 60%, yet only 8% first learn about it from their carrier.
Juniper Research forecasts 1.5 billion eSIM-enabled devices in 2026, up 30% year on year.
GSMA projects 76% of smartphone connections will be eSIM by 2030.