In Ten Years EU Prices Rose but Mobile Phone Services Got 12% Cheaper

How telecom prices are measured

Inflation in the EU is measured with one common instrument, the harmonised index of consumer prices, which follows what households pay for the same goods and services from one year to the next. Since the release of its January 2026 figures Eurostat has published that index under a revised classification of spending, which gives telecommunications four separate indices: fixed lines, mobile phone services, internet access, and bundles that sell several of these together. This study follows those four against the index of all prices, from 2015, the first year in which all 27 Member States publish a figure for mobile services, to 2025.

In practice, the index shows how the price of a particular type of mobile plan has changed. It does not show how much a household spends on its phone, because that also depends on how much the household uses it and what it decides to buy.

Phone and internet prices fell behind inflation

Across the EU, consumer prices as a whole rose 32.9% between 2015 and 2025. None of the four telecom indices came close. Fixed-line services rose 13.4% and bundled packages 9.2%, while internet access fell 3.6% and mobile phone services fell 12.0%.

On Eurostat's published rates, the mobile index for the EU has not risen in a single year of the period. It fell in ten of the eleven years from 2015 to 2025 and its rate was 0.0% in 2021. In 2022, when consumer prices rose 9.2%, the price of mobile services fell 1.0%; in 2025 it fell 3.0% against overall inflation of 2.5%.

Where mobile services became much cheaper

The price of mobile phone services fell in 15 Member States over the ten years. In the Netherlands it more than halved, falling 54.9%, and it dropped in every year from 2016 to 2025. Austria follows with a fall of 41.1%, then Denmark at 35.9%, France at 35.8% and Belgium at 34.3%.

Italy sits in the same group. Mobile services there cost 18.4% less in 2025 than in 2015 and internet access 15.3% less, while the price of fixed-line services rose 12.1% and prices as a whole 24.2%.

Where mobile prices rose

In the other 12 Member States the mobile index rose, but in 11 of them by less than prices as a whole. Latvia records the largest increase, 45.6%, and Poland 44.2%, yet overall prices there rose 50.9% and 53.7%. Slovakia's mobile services rose 31.3% against 49.2% for all prices.

Finland is the one Member State where mobile services became dearer relative to everything else. Their price rose 37.2% over the ten years while consumer prices rose 22.0%, and the Finnish mobile index went up in every year from 2016 to 2025. Its overall prices rose less than in all but three Member States, Cyprus, Denmark and Ireland.

Fixed lines and bundles

Fixed-line services are published for 22 Member States, and in 19 of them they fell or rose less than prices overall. The three exceptions are Belgium, where fixed services rose 58.3% against 35.5%, Latvia, at 57.6% against 50.9%, and Bulgaria, at 54.2% against 42.5%.

Bundles are harder to follow. Many Member States began publishing a separate index for them only after 2015, and three publish none for 2025, so a ten-year comparison is possible for 14 countries. In all 14 the price of bundles rose less than consumer prices, and in two of them, Croatia and Germany, it fell.

What the comparison does not show

The four indices measure prices. They do not show whether households pay less for their phones and their internet than they did, because what a household buys can change while an index holds it constant in order to measure price alone. Nor do they explain why the Netherlands and Finland moved so far apart: an index records what happened to a price, not why.