Data for Budapest and the M5 south to Serbia, installed before you leave. Hungary is on the Europe plan, so the same eSIM carries on into Serbia, Bulgaria and Türkiye — the Balkans plan does not cover Hungary. Goulash, for the record, is a soup.
The Hungary plan covers Hungary only.
The same 10 GB in a package that keeps working past Hungary.
38 other countries share the package with Hungary. A few of them:
What's included, when it starts, and how to get connected.
The M1 from Vienna, the M0 round Budapest and the M5 south: about 350 kilometres of Hungarian motorway between the Austrian border and the Serbian one. It is an easy drive once three things are sorted before the first kilometre.
Install your onesim eSIM over Wi-Fi and leave the line switched off. Buy the e-matrica on nemzetiutdij.hu against your number plate: the 10-day one costs 6,900 forints in 2026, the 1-day one 5,550 — but the 1-day one is a calendar day, so a drive that crosses midnight wants the 10-day. The 60 minutes the law allows after joining the motorway are for honest mistakes.
Switch the onesim line on where the package should start — at Röszke if an EU SIM has covered you this far, earlier if it has not. Then choose it for mobile data and turn data roaming on for that line only. Your home SIM stays in the phone for calls and texts, with its own data roaming off.
From Hegyeshalom it is the M1 to Budapest, the M0 ring round the south of the city and the M5 through Kecskemét and Szeged, all on the same e-matrica. Pay in forints: euros are often taken near the border at a rate that favours the till, and a card terminal offering to charge you in euros is doing the same. Budapest is worth one night instead of the ring road at midnight.
The main crossing into Serbia, open around the clock, and the famous queue of July and August. Hungarian and Serbian officers check you together on the Hungarian side, so there is one queue, not two, and the EU’s Entry/Exit System, fully in place since April 2026, registers visitors from outside the EU here. Check the Hungarian police’s waiting times before Szeged: Tompa–Kelebija and Hercegszántó–Bački Breg are also open 24 hours.
Buda is the hilly west bank with the castle and the views; Pest, across the Danube, is flat, bigger and where the evening happens. The ruin bars live in its old Jewish quarter, where Szimpla Kert took over a condemned house and stove factory in 2004. Buda and Pest only merged, with Óbuda, in 1873, and Budapesters will still tell you which side they are from.
In Hungary, gulyás comes in a bowl: beef, paprika, potato and broth, sometimes in a little kettle. The thick stew the rest of the world calls goulash is pörkölt, and with sour cream it becomes paprikás. Order goulash in Budapest and you get soup; call a stew goulash in front of a Hungarian and you get a lecture.
The story goes that Austrian soldiers clinked beer mugs as the 13 martyrs of Arad were executed in 1849, and Hungarians swore off it for 150 years. The vow ran out in 1999; plenty of people still won’t. Historians doubt it ever happened, and one has suggested the wine trade popularised the legend. Raise the beer, clink the wine.
Hungarian is Uralic, with 18 noun cases and no relatives among the languages around it. Asked why no aliens had ever been found, the physicist Leo Szilard had an answer ready: they are among us, but they call themselves Hungarians. Learn köszönöm (thank you) and egészségedre (cheers); the effort is noticed, and so is the accent.
László Bíró patented the ballpoint pen in 1938, which is why the British still call it a biro; Ernő Rubik made his cube in Budapest in 1974. Since 2023 Hungarians have taken the Nobel for medicine (Katalin Karikó), physics (Ferenc Krausz) and literature (László Krasznahorkai). Mention any of them, and you will hear about the rest.
Destination guides
About 1,900 km from Munich to Istanbul. The two routes, every vignette and toll at 2026 prices, what the EES means at the border, and Türkiye's new rule for foreign plates with unpaid tolls.
Destination guides
Munich to Prishtina is 1,300 km, two big borders and one argument about Hungary. The 2026 tolls, the Kosovo insurance booth, and how to keep the whole car online.
Answers about data, coverage and setup for Hungary.
Yes, on the Europe plan: Hungary and Serbia are both on it, so the phone picks up a Serbian partner network a minute or two after Röszke and the allowance carries on to Belgrade and beyond. That border is also where an EU SIM stops roaming at home rates. The Balkans plan covers Serbia but not Hungary — on this road it only makes sense from the border south.
To Türkiye, one: Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria and Türkiye are all on the Europe plan, so the Sıla yolu runs on a single package to Istanbul and beyond. To Kosovo, it depends on your own SIM. With an EU SIM, one Balkans package from Röszke covers Serbia and Kosovo. Without one, the Europe plan takes you to the Kosovo border and a Balkans package on the same eSIM does the rest. Guide: Germany to Türkiye by car
One of the networks listed under Local networks on this page; the phone picks one automatically when the onesim line connects. Don’t be thrown by the names on the screen: Telenor Hungary has traded as Yettel since March 2022, and Magyar Telekom simply as Telekom since 2013. If there is no service after the border, wait a minute with data roaming on for the onesim line, then choose a network by hand.
