Where your EU roaming actually stops

Every summer the same search spikes in Germany: does data roaming work in Norway? It is a reasonable thing to wonder. Norway is not in the EU, it is expensive, and it is the kind of place where a phone bill can quietly ruin a holiday. The short answer is that your allowance works there. The useful answer is that the places where it stops are not the ones most people worry about.

The rule, and the four words that qualify it

European roaming rests on one sentence. Your operator may not charge you more for using your phone in another member state than it charges you at home. That is the whole of Roam Like At Home, in force since 2017 and restated in the regulation that governs it today.

Read the last four words again. Almost everything in this guide lives inside "subject to Articles 5 and 6": Article 5 is fair use, Article 6 lets a regulator authorise one operator to add a surcharge. The rule is real and it is not unconditional. It also has an end date, 30 June 2032, so anything that treats free EU roaming as permanent is overstating it.

So, Norway

Norway is in the European Economic Area, and the roaming regulation was taken into the EEA Agreement by a Joint Committee decision with effect from 1 July 2022. Iceland and Liechtenstein came the same way. Your operator says so too: Telekom's own roaming page names "die Mitgliedsstaaten der Europäischen Union sowie Norwegen, Island und Liechtenstein", and Vodafone, O2, ALDI TALK and 1&1 all list the three by name. A week in Bergen bills like a week in Barcelona.

There is one odd consequence, though it is milder than it sounds. Because Norway is inside the roaming area and Switzerland is not, a German subscriber's Norwegian days sit on the away side of the presence check described below, while Swiss days are treated as if they were spent at home. That looks like a penalty for choosing the fjords. It is not, because you only have to pass one of two tests, and a holiday passes both comfortably.

Three tiers, not two

The shorthand most guides use, the EU plus Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway, stopped being correct in January 2026. It is more useful to think in three tiers.

Moldova and Ukraine are the ones that surprise people, because they arrived through a different door. Neither joined the EU or the EEA. Each signed a reciprocal roaming decision under its Association Agreement, both applying from 1 January 2026, which extends the EU roaming rules to it. The practical result is the same as the first tier, with one caveat worth knowing: Moldova's decision lets the EU suspend the arrangement if Moldovan law stops tracking the EU's.

Switzerland is the one to actually check

Turkey and the Balkans surprise nobody. Switzerland does, because it sits in the middle of the map, and because whether you pay extra there depends entirely on which German brand you are with rather than on any law. There is no EU-Switzerland roaming agreement at all, and the Swiss regulator confirms none exists.

Two things in that table are worth pausing on. congstar splits Switzerland down the middle: calls and texts are charged as Zone 2, but a footnote puts Swiss data in Zone 1, so your data rides your normal allowance while a phone call does not. And nobody has to keep the UK in their EU zone, because the EU-UK trade agreement expressly requires neither side to regulate roaming rates.

Fair use is a ceiling, not a trap

Fair use exists to stop someone buying a cheap SIM in one country and living on it permanently in another. It is not meant to limit a holiday, and the regulation says so in terms.

In practice that becomes a number, and only on two kinds of tariff: genuinely unlimited plans, and plans priced so low per gigabyte that they count as an "open data bundle". If you bought a plain 10 GB contract, you get your 10 GB abroad and none of this applies to you. On unlimited, the cap follows a formula rather than the operator's mood: at least twice your monthly price excluding VAT, divided by the regulated wholesale rate, which is EUR 1.10 per gigabyte through 2026 and EUR 1.00 from January 2027. Because that rate fell in January 2026, the allowance on an unchanged plan went up that day. Vodafone publishes 135 GB on Mobil XL and 107 GB on GigaMobil Young XL; O2 publishes the formula itself with a worked example of about 36 GB. Either way it is far more than a holiday uses. What "unlimited" really means goes through the throttling side.

The four-month rule, and why one long trip is fine

The other half of fair use is about where you live, not how much you use. Your operator may check whether you are really a domestic customer who travels. It may only look over a window of at least four months, and the test is more forgiving than most guides admit.

• You are safe if EITHER most of your usage OR most of your days were domestic. Both have to fail before anything happens.
• Any day your phone touched your home network counts as a full day at home, even if you flew out that morning.
• Days outside the roaming area are not supposed to count against you. A month in Thailand does not, and neither does a month in Switzerland.
• A day when the handset joined no network at all drops out of the count entirely rather than counting against you.
• Your operator must warn you first and give you at least two weeks to change the pattern. A surcharge with no warning is not lawful, and it has to stop once your usage looks normal again.

So an ordinary long holiday does not put you at risk. What does is using a German SIM as your only line while living in Lisbon half the year, which is the behaviour the rule was written for.

The expensive one: ships and planes

This is the part worth reading twice, because it is where the four-figure bills actually come from, and it has nothing to do with which country you are in. The regulation defines the networks it covers, and the definition has two limbs that a shipboard cell fails.

Terrestrial, and in a Member State. The onboard network on a ferry or an aircraft is an ordinary small cell with a satellite backhaul, so your phone joins it silently as though it were any other network, but it is neither of those things. Position makes no difference: a ferry in the Kiel Fjord running its own cell is as far outside the rules as one mid-Atlantic. The tell is the network name, not the country. Anything showing as 901 followed by two digits, or as MCP, Telenor Maritime, Cellular at Sea, wmsatsea, AeroMobile or OnAir, is outside your allowance.

There is a backstop, and it is worth knowing exactly how far it goes. The regulation makes your operator run a default spending limit of EUR 50 excluding VAT per billing month, with a warning at 80 percent, and that limit does extend to ships and planes. But it covers data only. There is no cap of any kind on voice calls or SMS at sea, and EUR 50 of satellite data is a very small amount of data.

For Norway specifically this matters less than it sounds. Terrestrial coverage along the coast and in the fjords is good, so the genuine exposure is the open-sea legs, above all the German and Danish crossings, rather than the sightseeing.

The small print of the map

A handful of places break the pattern, and the rule is always the same: it depends on where the network is, not where you are standing or which flag flies.

• Svalbard is outside the EEA roaming area. Norway exempted it when it ratified the EEA Agreement, under Protocol 40, because the 1920 Svalbard Treaty requires equal treatment of all its parties. Norwegian operators bill it as domestic anyway, but an EU SIM is entirely at its operator's discretion there.
• Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man were never inside EU roaming, not even before Brexit. This is the most common false assumption on the list.
• Greenland and the Faroe Islands are outside, despite the Danish SIM in your pocket making no difference at all.
• Saint-Martin is one Caribbean island with two regimes: the French north is inside, the Dutch Sint Maarten south is outside. Walking across changes the bill.
• Andorra, Monaco and San Marino are outside the EU and the EEA, so what you pay is purely your operator's choice. In the Vatican you usually pay EU rates, because there is no Vatican network and your phone lands on an Italian one.
• Liechtenstein is inside and Switzerland, a few hundred metres across the Rhine, is not. That is the easiest accidental border crossing in Europe to make with a phone.

What to do before you go

Most of this is a five-minute job on the sofa rather than anything you do at the airport.

• Check your destination's zone on your operator's own page, not a comparison site. Switzerland, the UK and Turkey are the three that differ most between brands.
• On an unlimited plan, find the roaming gigabyte figure in your contract or app. Operators are required to state it, and it rose in January 2026.
• Leave the EUR 50 cut-off alone. It is the default, and it is what stands between a mistake and a large bill.
• Carrying both a home SIM and a travel plan? Turn data roaming off on the home line and on for the travel line, so the phone cannot quietly fall back. Our dual-SIM guide shows both screens, and why the roaming switch belongs on explains the one that confuses everyone.
• Airplane mode before a ferry leaves, and use the ship's wifi instead.

If your trip crosses in and out of the covered area, a travel eSIM sidesteps the whole question: one plan priced the same in Oslo, Zurich and Istanbul, with your home line kept for calls and bank codes. One eSIM, 39 countries covers a multi-country European route, and eSIM vs local SIM vs roaming is the honest comparison of all three options.

Get a travel eSIM for 200+ destinations in under a minute.

Keep reading

iPhone 18 Pro, Pro Max and Duo: the eSIM changes

How long can an eSIM wait before you activate it?

Pay as you go eSIM: one balance, every border