How Many eSIM Profiles Can You Store?

Short answer: most removable eSIM cards advertise 15 stored profiles and iPhones advertise "eight or more," but you will hit one of three different ceilings first — a licence tier you paid for, the card's non-volatile memory in KB, or the number of profiles that can be active at once (usually one on a removable card, two on a modern iPhone). These are separate limits with separate causes. Most travellers never need more than two or three.

Disclosure: published by Switch eSIM, which sells removable eSIM cards. This article explains why advertised profile counts overstate what you'll get, including on our own product. Capacity figures for Switch cards are marked unverified — see limitations.

Three ceilings, not one

Ceiling	What sets it	Typical value	How you find out
Licence / download quota	The vendor's commercial tier	eSIM.me: 2, 5, 7, 10 or 15 by licence · 5ber Standard: 2 free downloads then paid	App refuses before any network request
eUICC memory (KB)	Chip NVM minus each profile's size	Unknown per-product; eUICC spec floor historically ~512 KB	Download fails partway with an out-of-space error
Active profiles	Modem and eUICC port architecture	1 on most removable cards · 2 on iPhone 13+ · MEP on Pixel 7+	Enabling one profile disables another

Hitting the first is a purchase decision. Hitting the second is physics. Hitting the third has nothing to do with storage at all — and it's the one most people are actually complaining about when they say a card "only holds one."

Why the honest number is measured in KB

A profile is not a number. It's a filesystem: an ISD-P security domain, a USIM (and often ISIM) application, authentication keys, elementary files, and frequently optional extras — SIM Toolkit applets, OTA/RFM channels, carrier menus. A minimal data-only travel profile and a full carrier profile with a toolkit menu differ substantially in size.

For scale: a traditional single-profile SIM typically carried 64 KB or 128 KB of memory, and eUICC implementations were described as requiring a minimum of 512 KB when the technology was being commercialised. Treat that 512 KB as a historical floor, not a current spec — it's from a 2016 industry source and modern chips vary.

Eseye, which ships eUICCs commercially, states the position plainly: the number of profiles storable "is limited only by the memory available and the size of each network operator's profile."

This is why the conversion table you were looking for doesn't exist. Divide memory by profile size and you get an answer that changes depending on which carriers you load. Two people with identical cards can legitimately fit different numbers of profiles. Apple's phrasing — "you can store eight or more eSIMs," with no stated maximum — is widely read as evasive, and Macworld has noted the oddity, but it's arguably the most accurate thing anyone in the industry says about capacity.

What I could not obtain: measured sizes, in KB, of real travel-eSIM profiles. The Osmocom eUICC manual maintains a profile database and an "Anatomy of the eSIM profile" write-up that likely contain these figures; I couldn't retrieve them before publication. Until someone does, any specific KB-per-profile number on the web is an estimate wearing a lab coat.

How to actually measure free memory

If you have a card reader and are comfortable with APDUs, GlobalPlatform's GET DATA with tag FF21 returns Extended Card Resources Information, which includes free non-volatile memory (tag 82) and free volatile memory (tag 83).

Three caveats, all real:

Support is manufacturer-dependent. It is not guaranteed on any given card.
Java Card APIs commonly cap returned values at 32,767, so large figures may be truncated or reported differently.
Cards reserve memory for transactions and internal operations, so "free" is not "usable by you."

There is no way to do this from a phone UI. If a vendor won't state capacity in KB, the practical answer for most users is that you find out by filling the card.

What happens when you hit the limit

Profile installation is atomic — it either completes or it doesn't. You won't get a half-installed profile. You'll get a download failure, and the failure mode is unhelpfully generic in most LPAs: a spinner, then an error, with no indication of which of the three ceilings you hit.

Diagnostic shortcut: if the app fails instantly with no network activity, suspect a licence or download-quota limit. If it fails after authenticating with the provisioning server, suspect memory.

(I was not able to confirm the exact SGP.22 error name returned for insufficient eUICC memory. SGP.22 v2.6.1 does contain a section on "Limitation for Profile Installation," which is the relevant normative text.)

Deleting vs disabling — read this before you free up space

These are not two strengths of the same action.

Disabling deactivates a profile but leaves it stored. It frees no memory. On a card with one active slot, disabling is simply how you switch lines.

Deleting removes the profile from the eUICC permanently. It frees memory — and it is generally not reversible. Most travel-eSIM activation codes and QR codes are single-use: once the profile is deleted, the code will not install it again, and recovery depends entirely on whether that provider will re-issue. Remaining data on a deleted profile is frequently just gone.

There is also eUICC Memory Reset, exposed in SGP.22 and in tools like the open-source euicc-go library. It deletes all operational profiles at once. It is the correct tool for selling a card and the wrong tool for making room.

Practical rule: never delete a profile with unused data or an active number to make space for a new one. If you're at capacity, that's a signal to buy a second card, not to bulldoze a plan you paid for. We'd rather say that than sell you a bigger tier.

Do you actually need 15?

Probably not. A realistic heavy-traveller loadout is:

home carrier profile (often staying on a separate physical SIM, not the card)
one regional profile for the current trip
one leftover profile from the last trip you haven't deleted

That's two or three. The case for high capacity is narrow: people who revisit the same handful of countries and want to keep a working local profile per country rather than re-buying. If that's not you, buy the cheapest tier that fits your actual travel pattern — and check the download allowance, not just the storage number, because 5ber's Standard tier demonstrates those can be priced separately.

One more trap: a second card doesn't buy you a second active line unless your phone has two working SIM slots. 5ber's own documentation confirms two of its cards in a dual-SIM phone yields two active profiles total — that's a phone limit, not a card limit.

Limitations

Capacity figures for competitor products are vendor marketing claims, not measurements — I did not test any card. Switch's own per-SKU storage capacity in KB, chip vendor, and download-metering policy were not available before publication and are omitted rather than estimated. Measured KB sizes of real carrier profiles are unverified. The GlobalPlatform FF21 method is documented but its availability on any specific eUICC is not guaranteed. The 512 KB eUICC minimum is a dated industry figure. The claim that deleted profiles usually can't be reinstalled reflects how single-use activation codes work in practice; I could not verify it against a primary carrier policy source, so it's stated as general practice, not a rule.

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