Best Pay As You Go bundles and plans

While many people opt for a SIM Only contract, you can also save money by opting to Pay As You Go instead.

As you typically only pay for what you use (and aren’t covering the cost of a handset), this is often a great, affordable choice for light users or those who use varied amounts of minutes, texts, and data each month. But even if you’re a heavy user, there are many excellent value Pay As You Go bundles.

What’s more, as you’re not locked into a contract, you’re free to move plans or even networks whenever you want.

There are a lot of options within Pay As You Go, but we’ve taken the hard work out of choosing the right Pay As You Go plan by summarising your options below, and highlighting the best of them.

Things to consider in a Pay As You Go plan

There’s a lot to factor in when choosing a Pay As You Go plan. It’s not just about the pricing and allowances – though those are certainly important too.

You’ll also want to consider where you can roam for free, whether you can tether, what – if any – extras the plan includes, coverage, and even the data type – as while all PAYG plans offer at least 4G, many but not all also offer 5G.

We’ve taken a closer look at the key considerations below.

Pricing

The table above highlights most UK Pay As You Go options, along with prices. As you can see, you’re choosing not just a network, but whether to truly Pay As You Go, or whether to purchase a bundle.

Note that if 5G isn’t mentioned then it either isn’t offered by a network on Pay As You Go, or the network hasn’t specified.

Based purely on the data above (not factoring in other things which we’ll get to below), highlights include 1pMobile, for offering the lowest standard rates of 1p per minute, 1p per text, and 1p per megabyte.

However, on that front iD Mobile and Tesco Mobile are also worth a look, with the former being almost as cheap, and the latter tripling credit in many cases. Depending on how much you use your phone, these options might work out well.

Looking at bundles, highlights include Three, Vodafone, Giffgaff, Lyca Mobile, Lebara, and Asda Mobile, for offering truly unlimited data (plus 5G), and EE for offering data rollover and boosts – these give you 500MB of extra data when you buy the same pack two months in a row, up to a total of six boosts.

Roaming, tethering and extras

When it comes to roaming, the key highlight is Three, which allows users to roam in Europe and beyond – some other networks also allow extensive roaming on some plans, but they’re typically limited just to Europe on Pay As You Go. Three is the opposite here, as it charges for roaming on Pay Monthly plans, but not on Pay As You Go.

Three additionally has its Three+ rewards scheme, but O2 and Vodafone have similar schemes too.

Other highlights include Lyca Mobile and Lebara, which are good for international calling, and Tesco Mobile, which gives you Clubcard points when you top up.

There’s not much to choose when it comes to tethering terms these days, but obviously networks that offer unlimited data (shown in the previous chart) excel here, as you can then tether without limits.

Some networks also offer data rollover, and EE rewards users with free data boosts, but these are detailed in the previous section.

Conclusion

Considering all of the above, Three is a clear winner, offering bundles with up to unlimited data, coupled with widespread roaming, unlimited tethering (if you have unlimited data), and 5G support, as well as access to Three+.

If you don’t want a bundle, then 1pMobile is the obvious choice, with its exceptionally low prices of 1p per minute, megabyte, or text.

We also think Tesco Mobile is worth highlighting, as with its triple credit plan your money can go a long way, and it gives you Clubcard points. Though its bundles are less tempting than some as they top out at 100GB of data.

EE and O2 deserve an honourable mention as well, as their bundles include data rollover, which gives you a second chance to use it if there’s some left over at the end of the month.

FAQs