Mobile Contracts for Students

SIM-only or handset?

You have two main options for your phone at university. You can buy a handset on a 24-month contract or choose a 30-day SIM-only deal. A handset contract bundles the phone into the monthly bill, locks you in for two to three years, and runs a hard credit check first, which a lot of first-years fail simply because they have no UK credit history yet.

SIM-only is just the allowance: data, calls, texts, your own phone. The good ones run on 30-day rolling terms, so you can change the data or cancel outright every month, which matters in July when you're at home on the family Wi-Fi paying for 40GB you're not using.

Buying a refurbished phone outright and pairing it with a SIM-only deal is the cheapest route; a refurbished iPhone 13 costs around £250 in 2026; adding a £10 monthly SIM brings your total two-year cost to £490. A 24-month contract for the same phone often exceeds £800 over the same period.

The one thing to check on a refurbished phone is the battery guarantee: the decent sellers promise at least 80% of original capacity, and anything less will be dying by the end of first year.

The four networks worth knowing

Which network suits you comes down to whether your data goes on TikTok or on calls home. Only four companies own UK mobile networks; everyone cheaper is renting space on one of them, so a budget brand on Three's network gets exactly Three's signal, just without Three's price. You're not giving up coverage to save money. This page is about how the contracts work; for live plan prices and which network is cheapest this month, use our student phone plans comparison.

VOXI

VOXI* runs on the Vodafone network and is built for people who live on their phones: social media does not count against your data on any plan, music streaming is added from the £12 plan and video from £15, and everything runs on 30-day rolling terms with no credit check. The catches are that tethering your laptop eats your normal allowance, and EU roaming is a paid add-on rather than included.

SMARTY

SMARTY keeps it plain. It sits on Three's network with one-month rolling plans from £6, no credit check, and EU roaming included up to 12GB of your allowance. Check Three's signal at your halls postcode first, because it can be thin in smaller university towns, and there are no shops if something goes wrong.

Giffgaff

Giffgaff* uses the O2 network, strong in cities and patchier on rural campuses. Its monthly goodybags start at £6 and can be changed or dropped any month, calls and texts to other giffgaff numbers are free, and support runs through a community forum rather than a phone line, which is fine until something is urgent.

Lebara

Lebara* is the one for calling abroad. It uses Vodafone's network, and every plan bundles international minutes, from a hundred on the £5 plan to unlimited on the £20 one, with no credit check. Data allowances are smaller than VOXI or SMARTY at the same price, and the app is basic.

Unlimited data, and why you probably don't need it

Unlimited data is marketed hard at people your age and most of you don't need it. Halls, campus and the average student house all have Wi-Fi; for a lot of students, mobile data is mostly the bus in and the walk between lectures.

Look at your phone's own usage screen before you buy anything: most students land between 10GB and 15GB a month, so a 20GB plan for £8 covers nearly everyone, and the £25 unlimited plan is loan money set on fire.

It's worth knowing what eats data. Spotify at standard quality is trivial, about 40MB an hour; TikTok is the one that hurts, closer to 800MB an hour because it pre-loads video; Netflix in HD is roughly 3GB an hour, which is why nobody should be watching it on mobile data.

The one case for unlimited is a student house with hopeless broadband, where tethering the laptop to your phone is how essays get submitted. Even then it's a stopgap: it flattens your battery, and the "unlimited" plans quietly throttle you if you lean on them like home internet. Fix the broadband instead; the comparison tool is there for exactly that.

Mid-contract price rises: what changed in 2025

Until recently every April brought a mid-contract rise pegged to inflation, with most networks adding 3.9% on top for good measure, so the £20 plan you'd budgeted for was nearer £22 by year two without you agreeing to anything. Ofcom banned the practice for all new contracts from 17 January 2025.

Before you sign anything for 24 months, find the contract summary. It has to say, in plain figures, what the bill goes up by and when, "£1.50 a month from April", so at least you know the number before it happens.

On a 30-day rolling SIM none of this bites. The network can still put the price up, with 30 days' notice, and your answer is to leave.

If you do take a fixed contract, put the end date in your calendar now. When the minimum term runs out you roll onto an out-of-contract rate that is always worse than the deal you signed, so a month before it ends, ring and haggle or text for your PAC.

The credit check, and how not to fail it

A 24-month handset contract means a hard credit check, because the network is lending you a phone and wants proof you'll keep paying for it. Most 18-year-olds have what the agencies call a thin file: no borrowing, no bills in your name, nothing to judge you on.

Odds are you'll fail a hard credit check for a new flagship phone, and failing leaves a search on your file for 12 months. Fail a few and your credit score sinks, which comes back to bite when a letting agent runs a check on you for a second-year student house.

If you want a file that passes checks by third year, two things do most of the work: get on the electoral roll at your term-time address, and run a student bank account with an arranged overdraft without ever breaching it.

Which is the case for 30-day SIM-only: at most a soft identity check, which other lenders never see. If you've just arrived in the UK the choice is made for you, since there's no credit history to check and no network will hand you a handset contract; a rolling SIM or pay-as-you-go is the route in.

Whatever you sign, pay it. Networks report to the credit agencies every month and one missed payment sits on your file for six years, which is longer than your degree. If money's tight, ring them before the due date, not after; they'd rather drop you to a cheaper tariff than chase you.

Roaming: who still includes Europe

Most of the big networks brought back EU roaming charges after Brexit, so a week in Spain on a daily pass at £2 to £2.50 adds £14 to £17.50 to the bill before you've bought a drink.

SMARTY and Lebara still include it: your UK allowance works in Europe up to a fair-use cap of around 12GB a month, which is plenty for maps and messages and not enough for a fortnight of HD video on a sunbed. Go over and you pay out-of-plan rates.

Check the country list, because Turkey and Switzerland sit outside most EU zones and data there can run to pounds per megabyte. Incoming texts are free almost everywhere, so your banking codes still arrive; listening to voicemail, oddly, counts as an outgoing call and can trigger the daily charge.

If your network does charge, switch data roaming off before you land and live on Wi-Fi, or buy a local eSIM from the likes of Airalo or Holafly for a few pounds; that only works on a phone that isn't network-locked.