Buying a SIM card at Haneda Airport (HND)

Everything international happens in Terminal 3

All international arrivals at Haneda come through Terminal 3, which simplifies this page considerably. Two places to buy, both in that building:

• NTT Docomo counter, in the arrivals hall. Open 7am to 11pm. Passport required, as it is anywhere in Japan — prepaid SIMs are registered to an identified buyer. Data-only tourist plans.
• IIJmio vending machine, running 24 hours. No staff, no queue, basic data-only packages.

There is no staffed SoftBank counter in Haneda Terminal 3, which is the practical difference from Narita. At Narita, a long Docomo line can be answered by walking to SoftBank on another floor. Here Docomo is the only staffed option, and if its queue is long the alternative is the machine or nothing.

We hold no detail for Terminals 1 and 2, Haneda's domestic buildings. If you are connecting onto a domestic flight and want to buy there, we cannot tell you what exists.

The queue is short, and the machine covers the rest

At peak, 10 to 15 minutes at the Docomo counter. Off-peak, five minutes or less. That is meaningfully quicker than Narita for the same transaction — partly Haneda's terminal layout, partly volume, since Narita handles more international flights.

Haneda also takes a lot of overnight and very early long-haul arrivals, and 7am is not much use to a flight that lands at 5.30am. The 24-hour IIJmio machine is the answer to that specific problem, and it is why arriving at Haneda outside counter hours is less of a difficulty than it sounds.

Free wi-fi runs throughout Terminal 3 with no session limit — Narita caps sessions at three hours and asks you to renew. If you want to buy and install an eSIM after landing rather than before, Haneda is a comfortable place to do it.

What it costs, at the counter and online

Our data puts a typical Japanese airport SIM at around $12, which is genuinely cheap by international standards. Japan's counters are not the mark-up business they are in parts of Europe, and any page telling you the airport is a rip-off here is not describing this market.

What you can buy in advance, every row read from the seller's own site:

An earlier version of this page said Japan's ladder stopped at 20GB and that the best metered rate was about $1.25 a gigabyte. That was true of every seller whose prices we had checked at the time, but Nomad's were not among them; they have since been read at source, and Nomad sells 50GB for 30 days at $35 — $0.70 a gigabyte, half the old figure. Its 20GB at $23 is $1.15. Above that the only route is unlimited sold by duration, which Nomad offers from $11 for 3 days to $49 for 21, and Airalo from $11.50 for 3 days to $69 for 30. Airalo's Japanese product appears as Moshi Moshi at checkout — that is a product name, not a network.

Our eSIM Go and Holafly figures for Japan are indicative and unverified, so treat them as something to check rather than a price to plan around. eSIMCard's rows have been withdrawn: we read its own pages on 18 August 2026, found the figures we held were wrong, and could not store the real ones. See our eSIMCard page.

When the Docomo counter is the right call

With a 10-minute queue and a roughly $12 price, buying at Haneda is not the mistake it is at some airports. Two things decide it.

The first is the network. No travel eSIM seller confirms its Japanese host network — Airalo, Saily and Nomad do not publish one at all, and the host networks named against eSIM Go and Holafly in our data come from their own marketing rather than any operator confirmation. Buy at the Docomo counter and you know exactly whose network you are on, which matters if your itinerary runs into the mountains or rural Tohoku rather than staying on the Tokyo–Kyoto corridor.

The second is time. Haneda is 18km from central Tokyo against Narita's 60km, and the Keikyu Line reaches Shinagawa in about 37 minutes, the Tokyo Monorail Hamamatsucho in about 30. You are in the city fast enough that a 15-minute counter stop is a real proportion of your journey rather than a rounding error.

If neither argument moves you, install an eSIM before you fly and walk straight to the train. Full Japanese pricing, carriers and the local-SIM comparison are on the Japan hub; check the compatible phones list if you are unsure your handset takes one.