How many eSIMs can a phone hold?

What each maker actually says

• Apple: an iPhone can manage up to eight or more eSIMs.
• Samsung: a Galaxy can download up to 20 eSIM profiles, and the real maximum may be lower.
• Google: you can have multiple eSIM profiles on the same Pixel. No maximum is stated.

Those are storage figures: profiles installed and listed in Settings, whether they are in use or not. They are generous because the eSIM chip was designed to keep several operators' profiles side by side. A phone has one chip, identified by its EID, and each profile on it has its own ICCID, as explained in what EID, ICCID and IMEI mean.

Storage is rarely the limit that matters on a trip. What matters is how many of those lines the phone can keep switched on together.

Why the limit is memory, not a fixed count

Samsung's explanation is the most concrete. The figure of 20 is a ceiling, and the real number can be lower because of the memory capacity of the eSIM chip. Profiles are not all the same size, so the chip fills up at different speeds depending on what you install.

Samsung illustrates it with a chip that has 100 units of space: profiles of size 10 would let you download about ten, while profiles of size 50 would allow only two. The size depends on the operator that issued the profile, not on anything you choose.

That is why two people with the same model can hit the limit at different points, and why the honest answer for any phone is a range. Samsung also points out that the number of eSIMs you can download is a different thing from the number you can have open at once.

How many can be switched on together

On an iPhone, Apple says Dual SIM lets you have two active numbers or SIMs, and from the iPhone 13 both can be eSIMs. Only one of them is used for mobile data at any moment.

On a Pixel, Google says two eSIM profiles can be active at once on a Pixel 7 or later, if the carrier allows it. On Samsung, the company's own setup guide says that on most Galaxy devices only one eSIM can be active at a time; dual SIM there usually means a physical SIM next to an eSIM.

The reason sits in Android itself. Android's developer documentation explains that running two profiles on one eSIM chip needs a feature called multiple enabled profiles, supported from Android 13. Without it, the eSIM slot supports a single enabled profile at a time. Our article on using two eSIMs at once goes model by model.

When the list fills up with old travel eSIMs

Frequent travellers end up with a long list: one profile per trip, most of them with plans that ended long ago. They do no harm while switched off, but they make it easy to pick the wrong line, and on a Galaxy they take up chip memory you may want later.

Delete an old travel eSIM only when two things are true: its plan has ended and you will not top it up again. Deleting is permanent. Apple says that after erasing an eSIM you need a new one from the carrier, and a deleted travel eSIM cannot be brought back from its QR code.

Leave alone anything you are unsure about, starting with your home line and any work eSIM. If you cannot tell the lines apart, rename them first; our guide on renaming SIM lines takes a minute.

Before you add one more

• Count the lines that must be on during the trip, usually your home number and the travel data line. That is the number that has to fit, not the total stored.
• Switch off lines you do not need for the trip instead of deleting them.
• Check that the phone has an EID and is unlocked; the stored count means nothing otherwise.

A Snoozim eSIM stays on the phone where it is installed, so the moment to make room is before you scan the code, not after. The compatibility page shows whether your model takes eSIM at all.