Iraq's cheapest verified eSIM rate is $2.35 a gigabyte, and its unlimited plans stop at ten days

One seller, fifteen prices, one date

We hold prices for one eSIM provider in Iraq: Airalo. Fifteen plans, every one verified — read off airalo.com on 17 August 2026. That is the whole dataset, and it describes one seller rather than the market. Saily, Holafly, Nomad, eSIMCard and eSIM Go all sell travel eSIMs; none has been priced in Iraq by anyone here, so none of them appears below with a number attached.

Airalo lists these plans under the name Babel Mobile. That is Airalo's own retail product name, not a carrier. Airalo publishes no host network for Iraq, or for anywhere else, so we cannot tell you which Iraqi operator the eSIM roams onto. It is the question we would most like to answer about this market, and the honest position is that the information is not published.

The metered ladder

Eleven metered plans, from 1 GB to 20 GB, with four unlimited plans alongside. Nothing sits above 20 GB. The rate falls steadily as the plans get bigger — $4.50 a gigabyte at the bottom, $2.35 at the top — which is the usual shape, and it means the small plans are the expensive way to buy.

The unlimited range stops at ten days, and loses to a metered plan

Airalo's Iraqi unlimited plans are $20.50 for 3 days, $32.50 for 5, $40.50 for 7 and $52 for 10. There is no fifteen-day or thirty-day version, which is unusual: Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Pakistan all run their unlimited ladders out to a month.

More useful than the gap is what sits next to the top of it. Ten days of unlimited costs $52. Twenty gigabytes over fifteen days costs $47. The metered plan is five dollars cheaper and runs five days longer, so unless you expect to burn more than 20 GB inside ten days — which on a phone means heavy tethering or video — the largest unlimited plan Airalo sells in Iraq is beaten outright by one of its metered ones.

The steps below it are steep too: three days to five costs an extra $12, five to seven another $8. Unlimited here is priced by the calendar, and the calendar is expensive.

Which tier to buy

• A couple of days. 3 GB over 3 days at $10.50, or unlimited over the same three days at $20.50 if you would rather not think about it.
• A week of ordinary use. 10 GB over 7 days at $27.50.
• A fortnight, or a phone doing hotspot duty. 20 GB over 15 days at $47 — the lowest rate in the country at $2.35 a gigabyte.
• A month. 20 GB over 30 days at $48, which is the same data with a longer window for a dollar. There is nothing larger.

Where $2.35 sits

Iraq is the second dearest of the five markets priced on 17 August, just under Jordan at $2.40 and above Qatar at $2.15, Saudi Arabia at $1.96 and Pakistan at $1.35. All five were read on the same day from the same seller, which makes that ordering worth something.

Against the site as a whole it is expensive. Thailand's floor is $0.55 a gigabyte, Austria's $0.58, Belgium's $0.65; Turkey was $0.69 on 13 August, India $1.82, Egypt $2.05. The dearest markets we hold are Kenya at $4.60 and Fiji and Nigeria at $4.70, so Iraq is well short of the worst.

The pattern that predicts most of this is where the ladder stops. Markets reaching 50 GB land near a dollar a gigabyte; markets stopping at 20 GB sit between two and three; the $4.60-and-up markets stop at 10 GB. Iraq stops at 20 GB and prices exactly where that suggests. Why Airalo draws those ceilings, we do not know and will not speculate.

What we do not know

We hold no local SIM information for Iraq — no counter prices, no operator names, no registration rules, nothing about buying on arrival. We have not researched it. A page that filled that gap with confident-sounding detail would be inventing it, and this site exists because a previous version of it did exactly that.

The same applies to local rules on calling apps, VPNs and SIM registration, which readers ask about across the region. We hold no data on any of it and will not characterise it in either direction. Check current official sources yourself before you travel.

And we hold nothing for the other five providers. If one beats $2.35 a gigabyte in Iraq, we would not know it. See how we test for what that distinction means, our Airalo page for the company across every market we hold, and the cheapest eSIM plans for where Iraq's rate lands among the rest.