Techniques are described to provide traffic steering and policy combining in a mobile network. In one example, a method includes combining, by a policy function of a network, a user equipment (UE) access policy comprising UE access rules obtained from a UE with a network-based access policy associated with the network to generate a combined access policy, the combined access policy comprising combined access rules; communicating the combined access rules to the UE via a message, wherein the message comprises an indication that indicates that the UE is not allowed to override the combined access rules with the UE access rules; and communicating the combined access rules to a user plane function handling traffic for the UE.