Buying a SIM at Charles de Gaulle, and why most arrivals shouldn't

If you flew in from the EU, close this page

France is in the EU. If your mobile contract is from any EU or EEA country, roam-like-at-home means your normal allowance works the moment the wheels touch, at no extra cost. No desk, no queue, no passport scan. Given how much of CDG's traffic is intra-European, that is the correct answer for a large share of the people who land here.

The only thing worth checking before you fly is your plan's fair-use data ceiling, which on cheaper contracts is occasionally low enough to matter over a fortnight. Everything below is for arrivals from outside the EU and EEA.

What is actually sold at CDG

There is no carrier-branded arrivals counter of the kind Australian and Asian airports run. What CDG has is Relay stores selling Orange and Bouygues Telecom SIMs, and tourist information desks that carry a mixed selection.

The queue is the thing worth knowing: around 20 minutes at peak, around 8 off-peak. CDG is one of Europe's busiest airports and the peak is not a rush hour so much as an arrival wave — several long-haul banks landing together, all funnelling into the same small retail units. A 20-minute wait for a SIM after a 20-minute wait at passport control is a poor start to a trip.

French prepaid SIMs require passport or ID registration. Practically that is not a problem at an airport — you are holding your passport anyway — but it does mean the transaction is a form-filling exercise rather than a tap-and-go, which is part of why the queue moves as slowly as it does.

It also means the eSIM route skips a step: no counter, no document scan at purchase, no wait.

What the queue is costing you

Our country record puts a typical French airport SIM at around $15. The eSIM prices below were read from the providers' own French checkouts — Airalo's on 13 August 2026, Saily's on 16 August 2026.

France's ladder runs a long way up, and the top of it is the cheapest data in the country: 50 GB for 30 days at $0.71 a gigabyte. Anyone comparing only the small plans will conclude the market is expensive, which it is not. Saily's 1 GB for 7 days at $3.99 is the lowest entry price we hold, and its 20 GB month at $22.99 now undercuts Airalo's $23.50 — both figures read at Saily's own checkout. Holafly sells unlimited plans from $5.90 for a single day, but that one is still an indicative listing rather than a price we have read at checkout.

Which network you land on, and what nobody publishes

Nomad's own listing points to no carrier, and neither does Holafly's. An earlier version of this page put Orange and SFR against Nomad, and Orange, SFR and Bouygues Telecom against Holafly. That came from our own older data rather than from the sellers: neither company publishes a host network for France, or for any of the countries we have read. Airalo, Saily, eSIM Go and eSIMCard publish none for France either, so there is nothing here on which to choose a plan.

For a trip that stays in Paris and the well-covered corridors this hardly matters. All four French networks work in the capital.

What we hold nothing on, and what we would do

CDG has three terminal complexes and Terminal 2 alone runs from 2A to 2G. Our record does not break the Relay and tourist-desk locations down by terminal, and we hold no opening hours for any of them. If you land at 2 a.m. into 2E, we cannot tell you whether anything is open. Free wi-fi runs throughout the terminals, which at minimum lets you install an eSIM or work out the RER B and CDG Express before you leave the building.

EU arrivals: buy nothing. Everyone else: install an eSIM before you board, land connected, and let the 20-minute queue happen to somebody else. Buying at CDG is not a disaster, it is simply the most expensive and slowest way to solve a problem you could have solved at home. The full French plan ladder is on our France hub.