Does Mint Mobile Work in China?

What Mint Mobile includes in China

China is on Mint’s list of eligible destinations for the Minternational Pass, Mint’s roaming pass for more than 180 countries. Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan are on the list too. Mint says roaming isn’t free: to use your service abroad, you buy and activate a pass. All prices on this page are in US dollars.

Pass	Price	Data in China	Talk	Texts
1-day	$5	1GB of high-speed data	60 minutes	60
3-day	$10	Unlimited, with 3GB at high speed	200 minutes	200
10-day	$20	Unlimited, with 10GB at high speed	500 minutes	500
30-day No Data	$5	No data	100 minutes	100

Pass prices are from Mint’s international roaming page and its help center, checked Oct 18, 2026.

• Who can buy one: all active Mint plans except trial plans. Your plan must have been activated in the US.
• How long a pass lasts: 24, 72, 240 or 720 hours from the moment you activate it, not calendar days.
• One pass at a time: activating a new pass ends the active one immediately, even if it has data or minutes left. You can store up to two passes, and a pass expires 360 days after purchase.
• When the high-speed data runs out: Mint’s roaming page says speeds drop but doesn’t give a figure. Reviews.org wrote in February 2026 that speeds drop to 128 kbps.
• Texts: receiving texts is free. Replies come out of the pass’s texts.

Mint runs on T-Mobile’s network in the US, but Mint doesn’t say which network the pass uses in China. A Reddit user wrote in August 2024 that the network in Beijing and Shanghai was China Mobile. T-Mobile’s own plans are covered on our T-Mobile in China page.

How to turn on Mint Mobile roaming in China

1. Buy a pass before you fly or after you land. In the Mint app, select Account, then Minternational Pass. On the website, go to Add Ons and select Minternational Pass. You can also text GO to 6700 if you have a payment method on file or money in your Mint wallet.
2. Activate the pass after you land. If you bought it in advance, Mint sends a text on arrival to activate it. You can also activate it in the app under My Current Passes, on the website, or by texting ACTIVATE to 6700.
3. Turn on data roaming in your phone’s settings. Mint says you need it for the 1-day, 3-day and 10-day passes.
4. To check what’s left on the pass, text GOROAM to 6700 or open the app.

If your phone doesn’t connect, Mint’s troubleshooting page suggests checking that the pass is active, turning airplane mode on and off, restarting the phone, turning off Wi-Fi calling if the Wi-Fi signal is weak, checking that data roaming is on and checking your APN settings. If that fails, call Mint at (800) 683-7392, ideally from a different phone.

Does Mint Mobile Wi-Fi calling work in China?

No. Mint’s help page on Wi-Fi calling says it is currently unavailable in China and North Korea, and may be restricted in other countries where internet access is tightly regulated. In other countries, Mint says Wi-Fi calls and texts to US numbers are free and don’t use your pass. In China, plan on using the pass’s minutes and texts. If you only need your US number for calls and texts, the 30-day No Data pass costs $5 for 100 minutes and 100 texts.

Google and WhatsApp on Mint Mobile: what’s known

Likely, but not confirmed by Mint. We found no Mint page that says how roaming data is routed or whether apps blocked in China work on a pass. Reports from Mint customers on Reddit’s r/mintmobile say they do:

• In a thread started in June 2024, the poster asked whether Google would work on the pass in China. After the trip they wrote “Yes it does work”, and in September 2024 they added that “everything works”, including YouTube, YouTube Music and email.
• In June 2025, a member wrote from China that the pass “works fine here” and that they had access to Gmail and YouTube.
• In January 2026, a member who said they had used the pass on three long trips to China wrote that YouTube, Gmail and Google worked without a VPN. The hotspot didn’t work for them, so they couldn’t share the connection with a laptop.

Two other replies in the January 2026 thread said you still need a VPN; one said this is because the pass connects to Chinese networks. Neither described a trip. No report we found mentions WhatsApp.

Reviews.org wrote in February 2026 that roaming speeds on Mint depend partly on the time it takes “for your data to travel back to the US and back again”, which fits roaming data going through the home network. It didn’t mention China. Salil Kanhere, a cybersecurity expert at UNSW, said in a Canberra Times article in July 2026 that roaming data is in many cases routed through the traveller’s home carrier or an overseas gateway, so some blocked apps might still work in China. He didn’t name Mint.

These are individual reports, not tests. Have a backup ready. Our WhatsApp in China page covers other ways to reach it.

One more report to know about: in September 2026, a Mint customer in China wrote on Reddit that verification texts from local Chinese services didn’t arrive on the pass, though everything else worked. In the Canberra Times article, Kanhere suggests installing an authenticator app before you travel in case roaming SMS proves unreliable.

When you still need a VPN

Roaming doesn’t help on Wi-Fi. The Canberra Times article says that if you rely on local Wi-Fi at hotels and cafés, blocked apps stay blocked. On hotel or café Wi-Fi in China, you need a VPN for blocked apps, whatever your phone plan. A VPN is also your fallback if Mint roaming data doesn’t get past the firewall for you. Install and test one before you leave the US. See eSIM or VPN for China and VPN for hotel Wi-Fi in China.

Cost compared with travel eSIMs

Extra cost for data in China for one person, in US dollars, checked Oct 18, 2026, on each provider’s site:

Option	Data in China	3 days	10 days	30 days
Mint Minternational Pass	3GB (3-day pass) or 10GB (10-day pass) at high speed, then slower	$10	$20	$60 (three 10-day passes)
Airalo	Unlimited, 1 Mbps after 3GB a day	$11.50	$35.00	$69.00
Holafly	Unlimited	$11.90	$37.50	$76.50

• 3 days: the 3-day pass costs $10, a little less than Airalo ($11.50) or Holafly ($11.90), but it has 3GB at high speed for the whole 3 days.
• 10 days: the 10-day pass costs $20, which is $15.00 less than Airalo and $17.50 less than Holafly. It has 10GB of high-speed data for the whole trip, while Airalo slows down only after 3GB in a day.
• 30 days: three 10-day passes in a row cost $60. Activate each one only after the last one runs out, because a new pass ends the active one. Airalo costs $69.00 and Holafly $76.50.

Mint’s passes include minutes and texts. Speed limits on unlimited eSIM plans, and how each one routes data, are on our eSIM comparison.