Europe Cuts Mobile Roaming Charges, But it Becomes Free in 2017

The price of making a call, sending a text or surfing the Internet (Mobile Broadband) from your mobile phone while roaming abroad within Europe has today dropped another level following last year’s regulatory changes (here) and the extra charges will be completely removed from 15th June 2017.

Sadly the agreement to end mobile roaming charges for those travelling between EU member states (France, Germany, UK etc.), which means that while roaming you’d simply continue to pay whatever you do today for your existing domestic (home) tariff, won’t be introduced for another year. But until then we do at least benefit from another discount.

The cost of EU roaming has come down hugely in recent years and from today it will fall again, with the maximum surcharge (this is added to your domestic rate) that mobile operators can levy dropping to €0.05 +vat (£0.04) per minute for outgoing calls, €0.01 (£0.01) per minute for incoming calls, €0.02 (£0.02) per text and €0.05 (£0.04) per MegaByte of data.

As before mobile operators are also required to impose a monthly cost cap on data of €50 +vat, although subscribers can optionally go above this via a specific request. This feature exists to help stop consumers being surprised by unexpected BILL SHOCKS, which is something that we’ve seen a fair few times in the past.