New roaming fees and caps from EE, O2 and Three

Money Talk is intended to inform and educate; it's not financial advice. Affiliate links, including from Amazon, are used to help fund it. If you make a purchase via a link marked with an *, Money Talk might receive a commission at no cost to you. Find out more here.

EE, O2 and Three have all updated their EU roaming policies to bring in additional charges or restrictions.

Vodaphone – the only remaining network provider – is the only one that hasn’t brought in any changes and so far it has maintained that it’s not planning to.

New EE charge

The most high profile change came from EE*: From January 2022, it will be introducing a £2-a-day charge on any days you use EU roaming.

The list of destinations included under this actually extends beyond EU members and includes remote islands like Guadeloupe and the Reunion Islands as these are part of France. You can see the full list of affected destinations here*.

The change will apply to all customers who sign up for a contract with them after 7 July 2021.

Anyone who already has a contract won’t be affected until they renew or are moved to a new contract – this is worth bearing in mind if you’re coming to the end of your contract and are trying to negotiate a discount as you will effectively move to a new contract when you renew.

If you have a plan with Smart Benefits*, you can choose the roaming pass as your benefit to avoid paying the new charge. Otherwise you can pay £10 a month for the roaming pass – worth it if you plan to roam for more than five days in the month.

BT Mobile* and Plusnet Mobile* both piggyback on EE’s network. So far they haven’t said they will follow suit but it would be interesting to see if they do.

Updated O2 data cap

O2* meanwhile have introduced new roaming restrictions that are only really applicable to those who have huge data allowances and will use them.

As of now, roaming within the destinations the network has designated the Europe Zone is subject to a monthly cap of 25GB. Anything over this cap will cost £3.50/GB.

You can see the full list of Europe Zone destinations here* – it too includes French departments in far flung corners of the world.

GiffGaff*, Tesco Mobile* and Sky Mobile* all piggyback on O2’s network. Some of these already have roaming caps in place but none have said that they’re planning to introduce new fees. Although of course that could still change.

Reduced Three allowance

Finally we have Three*, the network that really pioneered free roaming.

From 1 July 2021, it will reduce the monthly data cap for its EU roaming allowance to 12GB – the same across all of its Go Roam* destinations.

After this, from what I can see at least, usage will cost 0.3p/MB for those on contract and 5p/MB for pay as you go customers.

ID Mobile* is the main provider that piggybacks on Three’s network and for now at least, there doesn’t seem to be any changes in policy.