Buying a SIM card in Argentina: where, what it costs, what you need

The short answer

Three places, in rising order of value: the airport counter, a carrier store in town, or your own phone before you leave home.

All three Argentine networks — Personal, Movistar and Claro — sell prepaid SIMs to visitors. All three require your passport to register the line. There is no anonymous prepaid SIM in Argentina, so bring the actual document rather than a photo of it.

At the airport

Ezeiza (EZE), Buenos Aires' main international airport, has Personal and Movistar counters. Peak queue is around 20 minutes.

Bariloche (BRC) has Personal and Claro. Peak queue is around 10 minutes.

Prepaid SIMs are also sold at Córdoba and Mendoza airports.

Expect to pay about $15 for a tourist data package at an airport counter. That is convenient and it is the most expensive way to do this.

Carrier stores in town cost less

Personal, Movistar and Claro all run their own shops in Argentine cities. A prepaid SIM there typically runs ARS 3,000–8,000. Converting that to dollars depends entirely on which exchange rate you get — Argentina has long had a gap between the official rate and the parallel rate, and the two produce very different figures for the same peso price. At the parallel rate that band is roughly $3–8.

Either way, the arithmetic points one direction: the city shop is a fraction of the $15 airport package for broadly the same product. If you can go a few hours without data, wait.

Bridging those few hours is easy in Buenos Aires. Café wifi is genuinely excellent — porteños work from cafés as a matter of course, and the networks are set up for it. Hotels and restaurants are reliable, and hotel wifi in the provincial cities is good.

Or don't buy one at all

An eSIM installs before you fly and is live when you land. No counter, no passport scan, no queue.

The cheapest eSIM we hold for Argentina starts at $2.90, well under the airport counter price, and the mid-size plans are competitive with anything you will be sold on arrival. Check your handset supports eSIM first — see eSIM compatible phones if you are unsure.

The one good reason to buy locally

Personal is the network we recommend for visitors. It has the widest 4G coverage in the country, reaching about 92% of paved national routes, and 5G in 18 cities. On a Patagonia road trip that is not a marginal advantage — it is the difference between having signal between towns and not.

No international travel eSIM sells it. eSIM Go and eSIMCard list Movistar, Claro or both, neither claim checked by anyone; Airalo, Nomad, Saily and Holafly publish no host network at all, here or anywhere. Movistar is second nationally at around 41.4 Mbps against a country average of 45 Mbps; Claro is third. In Buenos Aires, Córdoba and Mendoza the difference between them is academic. On Ruta 40 it is not.

Personal is also the first Argentine carrier to offer a tourist eSIM, so a Personal line no longer necessarily means a plastic SIM.

So: if your trip is cities, buy an eSIM before you fly and skip the queue. If your trip involves long drives through Patagonia or the northern provinces, walk to a Personal shop with your passport. That is the one case where the counter is worth the time.

Full plan pricing across every provider is on the Argentina hub.