Vodafone international roaming from Australia: the A$5 day and its limits

How does Vodafone international roaming work in Australia?

Vodafone international roaming in Australia is a flat daily fee. With $5 Roaming, you pay A$5 extra on each day you use your phone in one of 100+ eligible destinations, and in return you use your plan's normal included data, calls and texts as if you were home. Prepaid customers buy add-ons instead.

This page covers Vodafone international roaming for customers of Vodafone Australia. Vodafone in the UK, India and elsewhere are separate businesses with their own prices; nothing here applies to them. We read Vodafone Australia's roaming pages on 10 November 2026. It is desk research, not a test. For buying a Vodafone SIM as a visitor to Australia, see our Vodafone Australia page.

What does Vodafone roaming cost on a plan?

A$5 a day, on top of the plan fee. The details matter more than the headline:

• A day is charged only when you use the phone. Making or receiving a call, sending an SMS or MMS, or using data triggers it. Vodafone says receiving messages is free and won't trigger the fee.
• Days are 24-hour blocks counted from when you first use the phone overseas, not calendar days.
• It uses your plan's data, not extra data. Speed-capped data (plans capped at 1.5, 2, 10 or 25Mbps) can't be used while on $5 Roaming. Once your included data is gone, Vodafone adds more automatically at A$5 per GB, and that extra data expires at the end of your next billing period.
• There is a 90-day cap. $5 Roaming works for up to 90 days per calendar year. After that, and in destinations without $5 Roaming, pay-as-you-go applies.
• Two plans on one phone means A$10. Vodafone says that if you use two plans in an eligible destination, say a physical SIM and an eSIM, you pay A$10 a day.
• It works on some flights. Vodafone lists in-flight roaming on selected flights with participating airlines, at the same A$5 a day.

Vodafone says plans signed up after 23 April 2014 have $5 Roaming on by default. Turn on the International roaming network in My Vodafone's roaming settings and it activates when you switch on your phone in an eligible destination. You can opt out in My Vodafone or by calling 1555.

Not every plan qualifies. Vodafone excludes Red and SIM Only Modem plans signed up after 2 July 2020, and some mobile broadband plans signed up between 31 August 2016 and 12 April 2017. Check yours in My Vodafone before you go.

What does Vodafone charge without $5 Roaming?

Vodafone's pay-as-you-go roaming rates on plans are A$1 per MB of data, A$1 per 60 seconds to make or receive calls, and A$0.75 per standard text sent. A$1 per MB is A$1,000 for a gigabyte. Watch the 90-day cap if you travel a lot: day 91 falls back to these rates. Turning data roaming off on the line is the simple protection; our data roaming guide shows where.

Vodafone prepaid international roaming

Vodafone prepaid international roaming uses add-ons, available if your last recharge was Prepaid Plus or Pay and Go. The terms list three:

Vodafone also describes a data-only Roaming Data Add-on alongside the Roaming Add-on with calls, texts and data. We could not read the data allowance of any add-on: the plan cards did not display when we read the page, and the terms don't state amounts. Check them in My Vodafone before you buy.

What the page does say:

• add-ons work in over 80 destinations, a shorter list than the 100+ for $5 Roaming on plans;
• expiry starts from midnight AEST on the day you buy, so buying late in the Australian day loses part of it;
• buy through My Vodafone, Express Recharge or by texting 1511, then activate roaming in My Vodafone;
• the SIM must have been activated in Australia, and the 90-day yearly cap applies here too;
• once add-on inclusions run out, prepaid roaming rates are taken from your credit.

When is a travel eSIM cheaper than Vodafone international roaming?

For Vodafone roaming, Australia's flat A$5 is fair value if your plan has plenty of data. The cost is time-based: ten days is A$50 however little you use, and more if you burn through your allowance at A$5 per extra GB.

Ten days in Japan, eSIM prices in US dollars from our checked price files:

For the US$18 eSIM to cost more than A$50, the Australian dollar would need to be below 36 US cents. So for data alone, the eSIM is cheaper on a trip of this length. On a long weekend, three Vodafone days cost A$15 and the gap mostly disappears; we'd roam and keep the number.

The other reason to switch to an eSIM is the 90-day cap. Anyone travelling for more than three months in a year will hit A$1 per MB, and that is where a travel eSIM stops being a saving and becomes the only sensible option.

The eSIM plans we list are data plans, so keep the Vodafone line for calls and SMS codes with its data roaming off. Check your handset on our eSIM compatible phones list, then compare on the cheapest eSIM page.

Vodafone international roaming against Telstra and Optus

Vodafone's A$5 matches Optus roaming on price, but Optus's Daily Roaming includes its own 5GB a day, while Vodafone uses data you already pay for. Telstra international roaming is A$5 a day in New Zealand and the Pacific and A$10 elsewhere, with 2GB a day. The Australia hub has the rest.