Buying a SIM card at San Francisco International (SFO)

One counter, and thin data behind it

Our data names a single SIM seller at San Francisco International: T-Mobile in the International Terminal, where the wait runs around 10 minutes. That is the whole of what we can vouch for.

We hold no opening hours for it, nothing about Terminals 1, 2 or 3, no second carrier counter and no electronics store. If you land on a domestic connection, or late at night, we cannot tell you what is open. Rather than fill the gap with generic advice about airport SIM shops, we would rather say plainly that it is a gap.

The wi-fi is the SFO-specific fact

SFO's free wi-fi is usable — not the token, throttled kind that struggles with a captive portal, but good enough to configure an eSIM on arrival or buy a transit ticket through a browser.

That matters more here than the counter does. If you land at SFO without data and without a plan, you are not stuck: connect to the airport wi-fi at the gate, buy and install an eSIM, and be running before you reach baggage reclaim, for a fraction of the counter price and with no queue at all. Two conditions attach — your handset has to accept an eSIM (check the compatible phones list, ideally before you fly) and activation over wi-fi does occasionally fail, which is exactly when a counter earns its keep.

No ID, about $20, and what that buys online

The United States requires no identification to activate a prepaid SIM — no passport, no licence, no address — and our data puts a typical US airport SIM at around $20. Every row below was read from the seller's own site on 13 August 2026.

The US ladder goes a long way up and gets cheaper as it climbs: 50GB over 30 days works out at $0.84 a gigabyte, the best rate in the entire US dataset, against $3.99 a gigabyte at the bottom. Anyone here for a fortnight of work, or driving the coast with mapping open, should be reading the bottom of that table rather than the top.

Airalo sells two named tiers in the United States, Change and Change+. The Airalo rows above are Change. Change+ is dearer at every size and we do not hold what the extra buys. Our eSIM Go rows are prices nobody can pay, and our eSIMCard rows have been withdrawn. Nomad's US prices are verified, read at source on 17 August 2026.

Nobody publishes the network

None of the eSIM sellers we track for the United States — Saily, Airalo, eSIM Go, Nomad, eSIMCard — states which American network its plans use. There is no way to shop on coverage here, and advice telling you to make sure you land on a particular carrier cannot be acted on. Buying from a carrier's own kiosk is the only route to certainty: a T-Mobile counter sells T-Mobile service.

Getting into the city

BART runs from SFO directly to Embarcadero, Montgomery, Powell and Civic Center, about 30 minutes to downtown, and the Clipper card is the easiest way to pay for it — loadable in the app if you have data, or at the station machines if you do not. Ride-hailing pickup is from a designated garage rather than the terminal kerb.

None of that requires you to have bought a SIM at the counter. Full US plan pricing, carriers and the local-SIM comparison are on the USA hub.