Do you actually need a VPN for Hulu?
Quite possibly not, and this is the part most guides skip because it does not sell anything.
Check Disney+ in your own country first. On 8 October 2025 Disney replaced the Star brand on Disney+ in international markets with Hulu, making it the general entertainment brand outside the United States. Programming carrying the Hulu name now appears there, in your country, on an ordinary local subscription. Check whether what you want is among it. If it is, you are done, and you have not had to work around anything.
Where a VPN has a real job:
- You already subscribe to Hulu in the United States and you are travelling. Note that Hulu's terms bar access from outside the territory even for residents, so this is your call to make.
- You want your other home services to keep behaving normally while you are away.
- You are working on hotel, cafe or airport networks you do not control, which is the ordinary reason to run a VPN anywhere and has nothing to do with Hulu.
Where it does not help, whatever you have read elsewhere: it will not get you a Hulu subscription if you do not have one. Hulu's terms restrict subscribing to residents of the territories where it operates, and no VPN changes your residency. A VPN also does not stop Hulu refusing a connection or acting on an account where those terms are breached.
What a VPN does here, and what it cannot do
A VPN encrypts your traffic and routes it through a server elsewhere, so the service you are reaching sees that server rather than you. Connect through a United States server and your connection looks American. That is the entire mechanism, and it is the same on both NordVPN and Surfshark.
What it cannot do is change your account. Your billing country, your payment card and your residency are attached to who you are, not to where your traffic appears to come from. This is the single most common misunderstanding on this topic, and it is why the honest answer to "how do I sign up for Hulu from abroad" is that we are not going to talk you through misrepresenting where you live.
What Hulu's terms actually say
Worth reading before you spend anything, because Hulu is unusually direct about this. Its subscriber agreement states that "the ESPN and Hulu Services are only available in the United States and certain of its territories", and that "only residents of the countries and territories where we offer the Services" are eligible to subscribe.
It goes further on the technical side. Subscribers may not "bypass, modify, defeat, tamper with or circumvent any of the functions or protections of the Services, including using any technology or technique to obscure or disguise your location", and may not access the service "from locations where we do not have rights".
So there are two separate barriers, not one. Residency governs whether you may hold an account at all. The location clause governs access, and it applies to residents too, so even a genuine United States subscriber is covered by it once they leave. A VPN answers neither clause: it cannot make you a resident, and using it to appear elsewhere is the specific thing the location clause forbids. We would rather say that plainly than sell you a subscription on a promise nobody can keep. Both NordVPN and Surfshark run servers in the United States, and what you do with that is your decision, made with the terms in front of you.
Recommended VPNs for travel
NordVPN: our pick for a trip
It is the one for you if you are away for a couple of weeks. Given that the defensible case on this page is a trip rather than a permanent arrangement, a short subscription is usually the right purchase. One plan covers 10 devices, plans run by the month, the year or over two years, and each carries a 30-day money-back guarantee, which is the honest way to find out whether Hulu will cooperate at all.
What matters for travel
- Servers in the United States
- 10 devices on a single subscription
- Independently audited no-log policy, reassessed in 2025
- Live chat support
- 30-day money-back guarantee
Surfshark: our pick for a longer stay
It is the one for you if you are abroad for months rather than weeks, or covering a family between you. Connections are unlimited, so everyone watches on one subscription rather than taking turns. It sells the same three terms and adds bonus months on the longer two, with the same 30-day money-back guarantee.
What matters for travel
- Servers in the United States
- Unlimited simultaneous connections on one plan
- Independently audited no-log policy, reassessed in 2025
- Live chat support
- 30-day money-back guarantee
Speeds and server access
We do not publish speed comparisons between these two, because we do not run benchmarks and we have seen no methodology behind the numbers that circulate elsewhere. What is worth saying is structural: the further your traffic travels, the more latency you add, so someone in Europe or Asia connecting to a United States server is asking more of the connection than someone in Canada.
Expect friction, and do not read it as a fault. Hulu's terms prohibit using any technology to disguise your location, and it is within its rights to refuse a connection or act on an account on that basis. Nobody, including us, can tell you how often a given server will work, and we would treat any quoted success rate with caution.
How to choose between them
The choice comes down to how long you are away and how many people are watching.
NordVPN
- Servers in the USYes
- Devices per plan10
- One month$14.99
- Cheapest plan$3.49 a month
- Guarantees access to HuluNo
- Money back guarantee30 days
Surfshark
- Servers in the USYes
- Devices per planUnlimited
- One month$16.45
- Cheapest plan$2.49 a month
- Guarantees access to HuluNo
- Money back guarantee30 days
| Feature | NordVPN | Surfshark |
|---|
| Servers in the US | Yes | Yes |
| Devices per plan | 10 | Unlimited |
| One month | $14.99 | $16.45 |
| Cheapest plan | $3.49 a month | $2.49 a month |
| Guarantees access to Hulu | No | No |
| Money back guarantee | 30 days | 30 days |
Setting up a VPN before you travel
The one piece of timing advice that genuinely matters is to do this before you go, while you are still on your home connection and your accounts are settled.
- Install and sign in. Set up NordVPN or Surfshark on the devices you actually watch on, not just your laptop.
- Test it at home first, so you find out how it behaves while you can still do something about it.
- If your app has a kill switch, turn it on so nothing leaks if the tunnel drops.
- Keep your billing details as they are. Changing your account country to chase access tends to create a second problem alongside the first.
- Remember what a VPN cannot fix. An account's registered country and Hulu's residency requirement are not network problems, and no amount of server switching changes them.
One caveat worth stating once more, because it is the whole reason this page is hedged. Hulu's terms prohibit using technology to disguise your location, so connecting through a VPN may put you in breach of them, and Hulu is within its rights to refuse the connection or act on the account. That is a decision for you to make with the facts in front of you, and it is not one we are going to make sound simpler than it is.
Final recommendation
Start by checking Disney+ where you are. Since October 2025 the Hulu brand carries general entertainment on Disney+ internationally, and if what you wanted is sitting there already, that is a better answer than anything on the rest of this page.
If you do want a VPN for travel, choose NordVPN for a short trip: 10 devices covers most people travelling alone or as a couple.
Choose Surfshark if you are away for months or covering a household. There is no device count to manage, so nobody has to take turns.
Whichever you pick, neither can promise a given service will let you in, and Hulu's own terms are explicit that it does not permit location masking. Both carry a 30-day money-back guarantee, which is what makes trying one a low-risk decision rather than a leap of faith.
