Does the Galaxy S24 have eSIM?

Settled in one line

Yes. The Galaxy S24 has eSIM and a physical SIM tray, so you can run a downloaded travel plan and your usual SIM side by side. If that is all you came for, you can stop reading — and if you would rather verify it on the handset than take a page's word for it, dial *#06# and look for an EID beneath the IMEI.

The one exception, for completeness: S24 handsets sold in mainland China ship with eSIM disabled. Everywhere else it is present and enabled.

With the compatibility question closed, the rest of this page is about the decision that is actually open.

The question worth more of your time

Your phone is not the constraint. The constraint is which way of buying data abroad makes sense for the trip you are taking, and there are three, none of which wins outright.

Roaming wins on effort and loses on price almost everywhere outside arrangements like EU roam-like-at-home. A travel eSIM buys convenience at a premium that is sometimes small and sometimes not. A local SIM is frequently the cheapest per gigabyte and costs you an errand.

Note what the table does not have: a column where one option wins outright. Anyone telling you eSIM is simply the answer is skipping the row where a local SIM is cheaper, and anyone telling you local SIMs always win is skipping the countries where the registration paperwork eats an afternoon. The S24 lets you take all three routes, so the decision is genuinely yours to make.

When a local SIM still wins

Longer trips, heavier data use, and countries where prepaid packages are priced for residents rather than visitors. The S24's tray means you never have to give up that option — one of the quieter arguments for Samsung's decision to keep it.

Our country guides work this out one country at a time, because the answer really does change: Turkey and Mexico are worked through separately, and where the local SIM comes out ahead we say so. Those recommendations earn us nothing, which is rather the point.

When the eSIM wins

Short trips, late arrivals, countries with fiddly ID requirements for prepaid SIMs, and any itinerary crossing several borders where buying a SIM in each one would be absurd. Also any trip where being connected on landing genuinely matters — a booking to find, a driver to meet, a connection to check.

Getting it onto the phone

Buy the plan, scan the QR code over wifi, and let the profile install before you leave home. It needs a working connection to download, which is the one thing you will not have at the airport you are flying into.

Then set it up properly, which takes another minute:

• Mobile data on the travel eSIM.
• Calls and messages on the home line, so your number stays reachable and your verification codes still arrive.
• Data roaming switched off for the home line specifically, so the phone cannot fall back to your carrier's rates unnoticed.

What our recommendations rest on

If you want to know why we point at one plan over another — or at a local SIM over any of them — how we test sets out the method, and the price comparison is where the numbers live. The compatibility checker covers every other handset in our data, including the rest of the Galaxy range.