France data prices, and the plans worth avoiding

If your plan is European, buy nothing

France is in the EU. An EU or EEA phone plan roams here on your domestic allowance under roam-like-at-home, which covers a very large share of the people arriving at Charles de Gaulle every day. Check your operator's fair-use data cap, then get on the train. Nothing below applies to you.

For everyone else — British, American, Canadian, Australian, Asian travellers — France is a crowded market with six sellers we track, and the spread between the best and worst deal is larger than in most of Europe.

The floor, and it is at the top of the ladder

The cheapest gigabyte in France comes from the biggest plan. Airalo's 50 GB for 30 days is $35.50, or $0.71 a gigabyte, read from Airalo's own site on 13 August 2026. Judge everything else against that number.

Prices marked verified were read off the provider's own site — Airalo on 13 August 2026, Saily on 16 August 2026, Nomad on 17 August 2026. The rest come from our plan data and have not been re-checked, so treat them as indicative and confirm at the checkout.

At 10 GB the market is tight — five sellers inside three dollars, and picking between them is not worth ten minutes of your life. At 5 GB it is not tight at all, and that is where the money is lost.

Saily, now that we have checked it

Every Saily figure on this page used to be an unchecked one. We read Saily's French plans off its own site on 16 August 2026, and the corrections went in Saily's favour: the 10 GB month is $16.99, not the $18.99 we had been publishing, and two sizes we did not hold at all — 5 GB and 20 GB — turned out to exist. The 1 GB week at $3.99 was the one figure we had right.

The 20 GB is the one that matters. At $22.99 for 30 days it undercuts Airalo's verified $23.50 for the same size and period, which makes it the second-cheapest gigabyte in the country at $1.15 — beaten only by Airalo's 50 GB. If 20 GB is your size, buy Saily. The 5 GB at $10.99 does the same thing on a smaller scale, coming in a cent under Airalo's $11, which is a difference no one should act on but does mean Saily is no longer the expensive option at that size.

The one plan to avoid

An earlier version of this page called Nomad's 5 GB month the worst value in our French data, at $3.40 a gigabyte. That rested on a price of $17 that nobody had read off a checkout. We have now read it: the plan is $9, which is $1.80 a gigabyte and the cheapest 5 GB month in France, two dollars under Saily's verified $10.99 and Airalo's verified $11. The same correction applies right up the ladder — Nomad turned out to be the cheapest checked price at 3, 10, 20 and 50 GB as well.

This is the general shape of the French market. Small plans are priced for people who have not done the arithmetic, and the penalty for buying one is steep: Saily's verified single gigabyte for a week at $3.99 works out at more than five times the country's floor rate. Airalo's verified 3 GB for three days is $6.50 and its 3 GB for seven days is $7, and Saily's verified 3 GB runs a full 30 days for $8.99 — more data, more time, roughly the same money.

Unlimited, and who sells it

France is one of the countries where only one provider we track offers unlimited plans. Holafly's verified range runs $5.90 for a single day, $20.50 for five, $27.50 for seven and $73.90 for 30.

The one-day plan is a genuinely good answer to a Paris layover. The thirty-day one is not: $59.90 sits well above the $35.50 that buys 50 GB across the same month, and 50 GB will outlast a month of maps, messaging and video calls for almost anyone who is not tethering a laptop all day.

Buying a French SIM in person

Orange sells its Holiday Europe tourist pack through Relay stores at Charles de Gaulle and Orly and through Orange shops in major cities, which is the standard route for visitors who want a local number. We are not quoting a price for it, because the figure we inherited did not survive checking; ask at the counter. What our own data holds is a typical airport tourist data package at around $15.

A passport or ID is required for registration, so this is a form at a counter rather than a grab-and-go purchase. Set against a verified 10 GB eSIM at $16 with no queue, the local option needs a specific reason — a French number, or a phone that will not take an eSIM.

Networks and coverage

Orange has the widest national coverage in France, taking in rural areas, coastal resorts and the mountain ski zones. That is a fact about the operator and it is worth knowing when you buy a physical SIM.

Which network a travel eSIM actually lands on is a different matter, and an earlier version of this page got it badly wrong by claiming most providers ran on Orange. Airalo does not publish a host network for France — its plans are sold as Élan, which is Airalo's own product name. Saily and Holafly publish nothing either — the French operators once shown against Holafly's rows came from our own data rather than from Holafly. Nomad publishes nothing either, and the attribution this page used to carry against its rows has gone. eSIMCard does publish host carriers on its country pages — we confirmed that on its Japanese one — but we have not read its page for this country and hold no network for it here. eSIM Go publishes nothing at all: eSIM Go sells wholesale to resellers and publishes no consumer price — checked on esim-go.com on 18 August 2026, where there is no basket, no checkout and no per-country page — so its rows cannot be bought or ever verified. See our eSIM Go page.

Coverage thins in the remote Alps above the treeline, in the rural Massif Central, in the remote Pyrenees, in parts of the Corsican mountains and in rural Brittany. No plan size changes that. Emergency calls work on any French network without an active plan.

Full provider-by-provider plan lists are on the France hub.