Pixel 7, 7 Pro and 7a eSIM — and what happens when you change phone

Yes, across the range

Pixel 7, Pixel 7 Pro and Pixel 7a: eSIM on all of them, physical SIM tray on all of them. A travel profile installs on any of the three identically.

With that out of the way, the two questions that genuinely differ between owners of a phone this age are what happens when you upgrade, and whether the handset is locked.

Changing phones is not like swapping a SIM card

A SIM card is an object. You take it out of one phone, put it in another, and you are done in ten seconds.

An eSIM is a profile downloaded to a specific device. Carriers increasingly support transferring their own profiles between handsets, and Android has tooling for it. Travel eSIMs are a different matter: many are tied to the device they were installed on, and the transfer paths that work for a home carrier may not exist for a plan you bought for a fortnight in Vietnam.

The practical rule is to check with the provider before you do anything irreversible. If you are upgrading mid-trip, or wiping the old phone before you fly, find out whether the profile can be reissued. If it cannot, you will be buying the plan again.

Carrier locks outlive the contract they came from

A lock does not lapse when the payments end. A Pixel 7 bought on a carrier deal in 2022 can still refuse a third-party eSIM in 2026 if nobody ever asked for it to be unlocked.

Most carriers unlock on request once the device is paid off, usually free, usually within a few days. It is worth doing regardless of travel plans, because it also raises what the phone is worth second-hand. What you should not do is discover the lock at an airport when a plan you have already paid for will not install.

Buying a used Pixel 7 for travel

These are common on the resale market and cheap enough to be a sensible dedicated travel phone. Two things to establish before money changes hands:

• Is it unlocked? Ask directly and get it in writing. A listing saying "unlocked" sometimes means "the seller never tried".
• Is the eSIM clear? A profile left behind by a previous owner is a nuisance to remove after the fact.

The presence of the hardware is not in doubt on this model, so no test is needed for that. It is the permissions around it that vary from one unit to another.

What to do with the phone you are replacing

If the Pixel 7 is being retired rather than sold, it has one more use. A retired handset with a live travel eSIM makes a decent second device: it holds the data plan, it can act as a hotspot for a laptop, and losing it on a trip costs you an old phone rather than your current one.

If it is being sold or traded in, remove the eSIM profile deliberately before the wipe. A factory reset removes it too, but doing it yourself means you notice in advance if there is unused data on it worth salvaging — and whether the provider will let you reinstall that plan elsewhere. Find that out before the device is out of your hands, not after.

The phone is the easy part

Once it is unlocked, every Pixel 7 behaves the same and your attention should move to what you are buying. Price per gigabyte varies more between providers than most people expect, and so does whether they will tell you which local network you are actually riding on.

Our cheapest eSIM plans sets out what the data should cost, and the compatibility checker covers the other handsets in the house.