Luggage Weight & Allowance Calculator

Luggage Allowance Guide

What do I need to know about Airline Cabin Bag Allowances (2026)?

Ryanair: one personal item (40×20×25cm) free with all fares; priority/Plus fares include 10kg cabin bag. easyJet: one small cabin bag (45×36×20cm) free with all fares; additional cabin bag with Up Front or Extra Legroom seats; 15kg hold bag included with FLEXI fare. British Airways: one piece of hand baggage (56×45×25cm, under 23kg) and personal item. Jet2: two pieces of hand luggage. These allowances change frequently — always verify on the airline's website before travel.

What do I need to know about Excess Baggage Fees?

Pre-purchase baggage fees are typically 50–80% cheaper than airport or gate fees. At the gate, Ryanair charges £/€50 per bag on short-haul routes. easyJet gate fees are £/€65–95 per item. British Airways excess weight fees: £65 per bag at check-in, more at the gate. Paying online at time of booking is always cheapest. The optimal strategy: weigh bags at home, pack to allowance, and pre-pay hold luggage well in advance when booking.

What's the key thing to understand about Packing Efficiently?

Packing cubes compress clothing and keep bags organised — typically saving 15–20% of volume versus folding. Rolling clothes rather than folding reduces creasing and saves space, particularly for casual items. Pack shoes with socks inside to save space. Heaviest items (shoes, toiletries) go at the bottom (closest to wheels for upright). Liquids must be in containers of 100ml or less in a single clear resealable bag (maximum 1 litre bag) for cabin baggage through UK and EU airport security.

What should I know about Weighing at Home?

Inaccurate home weighing causes most airport baggage problems. Luggage scales (hook-style, approximately £10) are the most accurate method for checking bags before departure. Bathroom scales can be used (weigh yourself, then weigh yourself holding the bag, subtract), but are less precise due to wobble. For checked bags, weigh fully packed and closed — not empty. Add the weight of any liquids or last-minute items added after weighing.

What should I know about How Airlines Actually Weigh and Enforce Limits?

Checked baggage weight limits are enforced consistently at check-in using calibrated scales, and exceeding the limit — even by a small amount — typically triggers an excess baggage charge, calculated either per kilogram over or as a jump to the next weight band, both of which are usually far more expensive than paying for extra allowance in advance online. Cabin bag weight enforcement is far less consistent: many airlines rarely weigh cabin bags at the gate unless the bag looks obviously oversized or overweight, but budget airlines in particular have increased gate-side weighing and sizing checks in recent years, with a fee charged on the spot — often at a punitive walk-up rate — for anyone caught exceeding the limit. Because enforcement varies by airline, route, and even by individual staff member on the day, the safest approach is to assume your cabin bag will be weighed and sized, rather than relying on it usually not being checked, particularly with budget carriers where cabin bag fee revenue is a meaningful part of the business model.

What's the key thing to understand about Weight Distribution Between Bags?

When travelling with multiple checked bags, or splitting items between a checked bag and a cabin bag, the strategic question isn't just total weight but how weight is distributed across each item, since limits apply per bag rather than to your total luggage pooled together. Shifting heavy items — a laptop, chargers, dense toiletries, books — into a cabin bag or personal item (where allowed and within that bag's own separate limit) can bring an overweight checked bag back under its limit without removing anything from the trip. For travellers with two checked bags, redistributing weight evenly between them, rather than one bag being heavily overweight while the other is well under its allowance, can avoid an excess fee entirely even if the combined total weight is the same, since airlines generally charge based on each individual bag crossing its own limit, not a combined household or passenger total. Weighing bags separately at home before travelling, and having a plan for shifting a few items between bags, is the simplest way to avoid an avoidable fee at the airport.

Do Packing Cubes and Compression Bags Actually Save Weight?

Packing cubes and compression bags are widely marketed as luggage-saving tools, but it's important to understand what they actually achieve: they save space and improve organisation, not weight. Compression bags, which use a valve or rolling mechanism to squeeze air out of packed clothing, genuinely reduce the volume clothes take up in a suitcase, which is useful for fitting more into a limited-size bag or for making a cabin bag's contents more manageable, but the clothing itself still weighs exactly the same regardless of how compressed it is — air weighs essentially nothing, so removing it from between clothing fibres doesn't meaningfully reduce the total weight of what's packed. Packing cubes offer organisational benefits (keeping items separated and easier to find, and in some cases allowing slightly more efficient use of a bag's internal volume) but similarly don't reduce weight, and the cubes themselves add a small amount of weight of their own, however minor. The genuine weight-saving strategies for luggage are different: choosing lighter-weight clothing fabrics, limiting the number of items packed, wearing the heaviest items (boots, a jacket) while travelling rather than packing them, and choosing a lightweight suitcase shell, since some hard-shell cases can weigh several kilograms more than a well-designed lightweight equivalent before anything is even packed inside. For travellers specifically trying to stay under a strict weight allowance, focusing on these genuine weight levers matters far more than compression tools, which solve a real but different problem — fitting everything in, not fitting within the weight limit.

Converting Between kg and lb Without a Mistake at Check-In

Baggage limits are published in kilograms on most airlines worldwide but in pounds on US domestic routes and a handful of others, and the two scales are easy to misjudge by eye. The conversion factor is 1kg = 2.20462lb, so a 23kg international economy limit equals 50.7lb (commonly rounded to 50lb), while a US domestic 50lb limit equals 22.7kg. Mixing these up in either direction on a connecting itinerary that spans a US carrier and an international one is one of the most common causes of an unexpected excess-baggage charge at the second leg's check-in desk.

Worked example: a bag weighs 24.3kg on a home scale. On a 23kg-limit international flight that's 1.3kg (about 2.9lb) over, typically triggering a flat overweight fee ($50-100 equivalent) rather than a per-kg charge on many carriers — removing even a single heavy item (a pair of shoes, a thick book) is usually enough to clear the limit and avoid the fee entirely, since most overweight charges apply in full regardless of how small the overage is.

Why Do Airlines Weigh Bags Differently at Different Airports?

Weight enforcement for the same route and ticket can feel inconsistent purely because of how and where a bag is checked. Airport self-service check-in kiosks plus bag-drop frequently use digital scales calibrated to flag anything even fractionally over the limit, while a staffed desk during a quiet period sometimes allows a small amount of flexibility at the agent's discretion — though this is never guaranteed and should never be the plan. Connecting itineraries add another variable: if the first leg is on an airline with a 23kg limit and the connecting leg is on a partner airline with a 20kg limit, the bag is typically checked through to the final destination under the stricter of the two limits, since baggage rules generally apply at the most restrictive point of a combined journey rather than being re-evaluated at each stopover.

Worked Example: Redistributing Weight to Avoid a Fee

Two checked bags weigh 26kg and 18kg against a 23kg per-bag allowance. The first bag is 3kg over, which would trigger an excess baggage fee even though the second bag has 5kg of unused allowance sitting idle. Moving roughly 3kg of items — a pair of shoes, a jacket, a couple of paperback books — from the heavier bag to the lighter one brings both bags to approximately 23kg and 21kg, both within the per-bag limit, at zero extra cost. This only works where an airline's policy explicitly allows redistribution before weigh-in (most do, as long as it happens at the check-in desk before bags are weighed) and where the total combined weight across both bags doesn't itself breach a separate total-weight allowance some airlines also apply — worth checking both rules, not just the per-bag figure, before relying on this trick.