Starlink Roam vs Residential: Plan Rules, Costs and the Restrictions Nobody Reads

Roam is described everywhere as “the RV plan” and Residential as “the home plan.” That framing is why a lot of people are paying for the wrong one.

What you are actually buying with Roam is a mobility licence: the right to use the terminal anywhere in your registered country or region without telling Starlink where it is, and the right to use it while moving. What you give up for that is network priority. Roam is the lowest tier of Starlink service — best-effort data that yields to everyone else when a cell gets busy.

Residential buys the opposite trade. Higher standard-data priority and, at the entry tier, a lower price, in exchange for being pinned to one service address with no in-motion use and no crossing borders.

Almost every real decision here comes down to that trade, plus one thing that changed in July 2026 and hasn’t filtered into most published guidance yet.

What each plan costs

US pricing, verified August 2026, following the increases that took effect for existing customers on 18 June 2026. Hardware is separate: currently $349 to buy or $10 a month to rent, with rental customers not owning the dish.

Two things in that table deserve more attention than they usually get.

The entry tiers are the same price. Roam 100 GB and Residential 100 Mbps both sit at $55. If you’re stationary, the Residential plan gives you unlimited data and better priority for the same money. The only reason to be on Roam at that price point is that you move.

Residential 100 and 200 are market-dependent. Plenty of rural addresses are only offered MAX at $130. That converts the comparison entirely: at $130 against Roam’s $55, a stationary user with modest needs may reasonably choose the capped Roam plan and accept the deprioritisation. Check what is actually offered at your address before assuming the $55 tier exists for you.

Priority is the thing you’ll actually notice

“Best effort” sounds like a formality. It isn’t. When a Starlink cell is congested — which increasingly means suburban and popular rural areas during evening hours — Roam traffic is served after Residential traffic. In an uncongested cell you’ll never notice. In a busy one during peak hours, the difference between plans can be substantial.

This is the single most under-weighted factor in plan selection, because it is invisible at the point of purchase and only shows up after a month of living with it.

In motion, and what “in motion” is limited to

Roam plans support use while moving at up to 100 mph. For road travel that limit is academic. The real constraint on driving with a live connection is line of sight: highway travel in open country works, and winding roads under heavy tree cover interrupt the link exactly where they interrupt cellular.

Two limits people miss:

• Water. Roam covers inland waterways and territorial waters to roughly 12 nautical miles from shore. Beyond that you need a different plan class — Ocean Mode is only available as an add-on to Roam Unlimited, billed per gigabyte, and genuine offshore use means the substantially more expensive maritime and priority tiers.
• Hardware. Plan permission and hardware capability are separate questions. In-motion use depends on which terminal you have as well as which plan you’re on, and the fixed-install dishes are not the same proposition as the Mini here. Check the terminal spec, not just the plan page. Our V5, Mini and Gen 4 comparison covers which hardware suits which installation.

Residential plans do not support in-motion use at all.

The July 2026 international changes are the real story

If you take one thing from this page, take this. Starlink rewrote its international roaming rules with effect from 14 July 2026 for new customers and 17 August 2026 for existing ones, and the changes are significant.

Roam Unlimited is now capped at 30 consecutive days outside your registered home country or region, per trip. The previous policy allowed 60 days, and was not consistently enforced. Once the 30 days expire, you return home to reset the allowance, transfer the account to the country you’re in, or upgrade to a priority plan.

Roam 100 GB and Roam 300 GB lost international use entirely. These plans now work only within your home country or grouped region. For anyone who bought a capped Roam plan specifically to travel, that’s a forced upgrade.

Two regions count as domestic. The United States, Canada and US territories are grouped together, as are most European countries. So US and Canadian travel is unaffected — good news for anyone driving to Alaska, and for snowbirds moving between the two countries.

Mexico and the Caribbean are not in the group. This is the change that hurts. Nomads wintering in Baja, and boaters heading to the Bahamas, are now on the 30-day clock and must be on Roam Unlimited to have a clock at all.

Global Roam is discontinued. It closed to new customers on 15 July 2026, and existing subscribers’ service ends 17 August 2026. The replacement for continuous international coverage is Global Priority, which starts around $250 a month for 50 GB — a large step up from consumer pricing.

Local Priority extends the allowance but doesn’t reset it. Upgrading gives up to 60 total days of international use including days already consumed on Roam Unlimited. Local Priority tiers currently run $55 for 50 GB, $155 for 500 GB and $280 for 1 TB, and it’s a land-based plan, so it does little for boaters.

Identity verification is back. Travel Registration requires personal details, a government photo ID and a live portrait before international use outside your registered region.

None of this affects a stationary US home. All of it affects anyone who assumed Starlink was a passport-free connectivity solution, and that assumption was reasonable right up until it wasn’t.

What 100 GB and 300 GB actually buy

The capped Roam plans don’t cut you off. Past the allowance, service continues at reduced speed — fine for email, messaging, voice and web browsing, poor for streaming. So the question isn’t whether you’d survive hitting the cap, it’s how often you’d hit it.

Rough consumption, and these are approximations worth sanity-checking against your own usage:

• Video streaming is the dominant variable. Standard definition runs about 1 GB an hour, high definition around 3 GB, and 4K somewhere near 7 GB. An evening of HD streaming is 6–9 GB.
• Video calls consume roughly 1–2 GB an hour, less on audio-only.
• General work — email, documents, browsing, messaging — is trivial by comparison, on the order of 1–2 GB a day for most people.
• Cloud backup and system updates are the silent consumers. A single OS update can be 5 GB, and a photo library syncing after a trip can be tens of gigabytes. Turn automatic backup off and run it deliberately.

Put those together and a couple working remotely, streaming a couple of hours most evenings, lands somewhere in the 150–300 GB range a month. That sits awkwardly across the 300 GB plan’s ceiling, which is exactly why measuring rather than guessing is worth a month of your attention before committing $95 a month to the difference.

The single highest-leverage change is moving from streaming to downloading. Fetch what you want to watch while on campground Wi-Fi or in a town with good cellular, and the same viewing costs you nothing against the satellite allowance.

Standby Mode, and whether it’s worth $10

Standby Mode keeps an account alive at around 500 kbps for $10 a month — doubled from $5 in the June increase. It’s available only to existing Roam and Residential customers and can be held for up to 12 months.

Do the arithmetic before you default to it. Cancelling service outright currently costs nothing and reactivation is a few taps, so for a six-month seasonal user, Standby costs $60 a year for a connection you’re mostly not using, against $0 for simply cancelling. Standby earns its keep in two situations: you need a low-bandwidth link at the property while you’re away — remote monitoring, a cabin thermostat, a security camera at low resolution — or you’ll be returning to somewhere with no cellular signal, where having a working terminal on arrival is worth more than $10.

If neither applies, cancel.

Which one to buy

Fixed rural home, single address. Residential. Check which tier your address is offered; if only MAX at $130 is available and your usage is light, price it against Roam 100 GB at $55 and accept the priority trade knowingly.

Weekend and holiday RV use. Roam 100 GB, with cancellation between trips rather than Standby unless you need the monitoring link. Under 100 GB is realistic for a few weekends a month.

Full-time RV or overland travel, US and Canada. Roam Unlimited at $175, or Roam 300 GB at $80 if you can live within the cap — which many people can, once streaming moves to downloads. The $95 monthly gap is $5,700 over five years, so it deserves a month of honest usage measurement before you default to Unlimited. Full-timers also face registration, insurance and domicile questions that interact with everything else, covered in our state-by-state domicile guide.

Extended time in Mexico or the Caribbean. Roam Unlimited is now a 30-day tool, not an open-ended one. Plan around the reset, budget for Local Priority, or arrange service in the destination country. Do not build a winter around the old 60-day understanding.

Seasonal cabin. Residential, cancelled out of season, unless you need the standby monitoring link.

A note on Residential and moving addresses

Residential plans are tied to a service address that the customer can update. Some travellers use this to run a Residential plan from changing locations, updating the address manually as they move.

Be clear-eyed about it: that is not what the plan is designed for, the terms tie the service to a fixed address, and Starlink has demonstrated repeatedly through 2026 that it will change plan rules and enforcement without warning or grandfathering. Building a full-time setup on a plan you’re using outside its intended design is a risk you’re choosing to carry, not a clever loophole.

Frequently asked questions

Can I use Starlink Residential in an RV? Not while moving, and not as a roaming plan. Residential has no in-motion permission and is tied to a service address. Parked at a single long-term site, with the address set correctly, it’s a legitimate use.

Is Roam Unlimited worth $175 a month? Only if you genuinely exceed 300 GB. Measure a month of real usage first. Roam 300 GB at $80 covers a lot of remote work and moderate streaming, and the saving is close to $100 a month.

Can I still take Starlink to Mexico? On Roam Unlimited, for up to 30 days per trip, with Travel Registration completed. The capped Roam plans no longer permit it. Canada is unaffected for US customers, since the US and Canada count as one region.

What happens when I hit the cap on Roam 100 GB or 300 GB? Service continues at reduced speed rather than stopping. It remains usable for email, messaging and calls, and is poor for streaming.

Does the plan affect how much power the dish uses? No. Power draw is a hardware property — the V5 terminal averages roughly 35–50 W against the V4’s 75–100 W. If you’re running from batteries, that’s the number that matters, and we size it in running Starlink off-grid.

Can I switch between plans mid-month? Yes, with charges pro-rated to the end of the billing month, which makes it practical to move up for a heavy month and back down afterwards.