US data prices, and the advice you cannot follow

The floor, and the step that gets there

The cheapest verified rate we hold for the United States is $0.84 per gigabyte: Airalo's Change 50 GB over 30 days at $42, read off Airalo's own site on 13 August 2026.

What makes that worth knowing is the step below it. Airalo's Change 20 GB for 30 days is $36.50. The 50 GB is $42. Five dollars and fifty cents buys you thirty more gigabytes. Anyone weighing up 10 or 20 GB for a month in the States is looking at the wrong end of the ladder.

An eSIMCard 20 GB row used to sit well under the verified ones here. It has been withdrawn: we read eSIMCard's own pages on 18 August 2026 and the figure we held was not one it charges. Our data holds an eSIM Go 10 GB row at $17, lower again, which is not a comparison 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. Saily's prices are verified and track Airalo's cheaper tier almost exactly, within a dollar at every size from 3 GB to 20 GB.

Change and Change+ are two different products

Airalo sells the US under two names, Change and Change+, and both run the full range of sizes. That means every "Airalo charges X for Y gigabytes in the USA" claim needs a tier attached to it or it is meaningless: 10 GB over 30 days is $22.50 on Change and $30 on Change+.

We do not know what the plus adds. Our data holds two products at two prices and nothing about what separates them, and we are not going to invent a reason for the gap. What the numbers do show is that stepping up a size on the cheaper tier beats stepping up a tier at the same size — Change's 50 GB at $42 costs less than Change+'s 20 GB at $47.

Unlimited is a Change-tier product too: $11.50 for three days, $18.50 for five, $25 for seven, $34 for ten, $46 for fifteen, $68 for thirty. Fifteen days unlimited at $46 costs more than 50 GB over a full month at $42. Unless you are tethering a laptop hard, the metered plan is the better buy.

Buying on the ground

The United States requires no ID for a prepaid SIM — no passport, no registration, nothing. That is genuinely unusual and it makes buying on arrival quick. Prepaid kits are sold at Walmart, CVS, Walgreens and every carrier's own stores, and at airport shops on landing.

The one local price we hold is about $20 for a SIM at a US airport. We do not hold what data allowance that includes, so we are not going to put it in the table and pretend to a comparison we cannot make. If you want the arithmetic to come out in favour of the shelf, you will have to read the box.

What is not in doubt is that the discount retailers are cheaper than the airport for the same product, which is the usual pattern everywhere.

The network question, answered honestly

Here is the thing this page used to get wrong, and it matters more in the US than almost anywhere.

Not one provider selling US data publishes its host network. Airalo, Saily, Nomad and eSIMCard are all blank in our data, and eSIM Go has no consumer page on which it could publish one. So the standard advice — "check you're getting T-Mobile before you buy" — is not advice at all. There is nothing to check. Any page that tells you which carrier a travel eSIM uses in the States is telling you something it cannot know, and we said it ourselves until recently.

This is not a small thing, because the US is a country where the answer changes your trip. Coverage between the three national networks diverges sharply once you leave metropolitan areas — on interstates through the Mountain West, in the national parks, on back roads anywhere. In Manhattan or downtown Chicago it is academic. Two hours outside either, it is not.

Which gives the physical SIM its one real advantage: at a Walmart counter you can pick Verizon, T-Mobile or AT&T off the shelf by name. If your trip is a road trip, that choice is worth more than the few dollars an eSIM saves you. If your trip is cities and airports, buy the eSIM before you fly and stop thinking about it.

Every US plan we hold, both Airalo tiers included, is listed on the USA hub.