What data costs in the Netherlands, and who should buy none

First, check whether you need to buy anything

If your normal SIM is from an EU or EEA country, stop here. Roam-like-at-home means your Dutch data comes out of your usual domestic allowance at no extra charge, and buying a travel eSIM on top of that is money thrown away. Check your allowance and your provider's fair-use cap before you leave; for a week in Amsterdam that is nearly always the end of the question.

Everyone else — British, American, Canadian, Australian, most of Asia — is buying something, and the rest of this page is for you.

The floor is $0.72 a gigabyte

The cheapest data anyone sells for the Netherlands is Airalo's Hé Hé 50 GB for 30 days at $36, which we read off Airalo's own checkout on 13 August 2026. That works out at $0.72 a gigabyte and it is the best rate in the country by a wide margin — the 20 GB is $1.35 a gigabyte, nearly double.

That 50 GB plan is easy to miss because it sits at the top of the list, and an earlier version of this page missed it entirely. If you use data properly, it is also the only Dutch plan that is genuinely cheap.

The Airalo rows were read on 13 August 2026, the Saily rows on 16 August and the Nomad rows on 18 August; all three are verified. eSIMCard's rows have been withdrawn: we read its own pages on 18 August 2026, found the figures we held were wrong, and could not store the real ones.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. An earlier version of this table carried a single Nomad row, a 3 GB month at $8; the real price is $9, and Nomad sells five other metered sizes we did not have. Hé Hé is Airalo's product name for its Dutch plans, not a network.

Notice the pairs. At 5, 10 and 20 GB, Saily prices itself exactly one cent under Airalo, and both figures are now checked. That is a genuine undercut and a worthless one — the two are matching each other rather than competing, and at 2 decimal places the cost per gigabyte is identical. Nomad breaks the pattern in the middle: its 10 GB month at $16 and its 20 GB month at $20 sit two and seven dollars under the pair, and the 20 GB plan at $1.00 a gigabyte is the best mid-range rate in the country. The other place the ladder moves is the 50 GB plan, where Airalo's $36 is $9 under Nomad's $45 and Saily does not compete at all.

Unlimited is worth doing the sum on

Airalo's Hé Hé unlimited runs $11.50 for 3 days, $27 for 7 and $69 for 30, all verified. Holafly's comparable unlimited plans are $11.70, $27.30 and $74.90, indicative in our data. The two are close enough that the choice comes down to which you trust and whether you need hotspot.

But compare against the metered floor first. At $0.72 a gigabyte, $27 buys 37 GB. Nobody uses 37 GB in a week on a city break. Unlimited in the Netherlands is a convenience purchase, not a value one.

Buying locally, and why almost nobody should

Prepaid SIMs from KPN, Odido and Vodafone Netherlands are sold at Schiphol, at Rotterdam, in carrier stores and in Albert Heijn supermarkets across the country. Tourist packages run €10–20, and our data has an airport tourist package at around $18. No ID is required at most Dutch retail outlets, so it is an instant purchase rather than a counter-and-passport job.

Even so, $18 at the airport buys you less than $36 buys as an eSIM, and it costs you a detour on arrival. The local SIM in the Netherlands is a fallback for phones that cannot do eSIM, not a saving. If yours is one of them, check the eSIM-compatible phones list first.

Coverage is a non-issue, and the network question is unanswerable

KPN was ranked the world's number one mobile network by umlaut in March 2025, with the highest score recorded in international benchmarking. Average 4G speeds run 75–90 Mbps nationally, and 5G is widely deployed. Coverage gaps barely exist for a visitor: the country is flat and densely populated, with only minor weakness on some Wadden Islands and slightly thinner signal inside the Hoge Veluwe forest. Emergency calls work on any Dutch network without an active plan.

Which network your eSIM sits on is therefore much less important here than in, say, Morocco or Mexico — which is fortunate, because for most plans we cannot tell you. Airalo, Saily and Nomad publish no host network for the Netherlands or for anywhere else. An earlier version of this page said Nomad named KPN and Odido; that came from our own records rather than from Nomad, and it has been removed. Holafly names nothing either, and the Vodafone Netherlands entry this page used to carry against it came from our own records rather than from the seller. eSIMCard does name KPN and Odido; that has not been confirmed against the operators, so treat it as the seller's claim rather than a fact.

WiFi fills in the rest. It is excellent nationwide — cafes, hotels, museums, public spaces — and every NS intercity train has it.

Full pricing for every provider is on the Netherlands hub.