Cabin Bag Sizes 2026: EU Airline Hand Luggage Chart

As of July 2026, the free hand luggage sizes on the five big EU budget airlines are: Ryanair 40 × 30 × 20 cm with no published weight limit, easyJet 45 × 36 × 20 cm including handles and wheels at up to 15 kg, Wizz Air 40 × 30 × 20 cm, Vueling 40 × 30 × 20 cm, and Transavia 40 × 30 × 20 cm at up to 10 kg.

Paid tiers, if you need the bigger bag: Ryanair Priority adds a 55 × 40 × 20 cm bag at 10 kg. easyJet's large cabin bag is 56 × 45 × 25 cm. Wizz Air Priority adds 55 × 40 × 23 cm at 10 kg. Vueling includes a 55 × 40 × 20 cm bag at 10 kg on its higher fares — and charges a steep gate fee if you turn up with one unbooked. Transavia's paid cabin bag is 55 × 40 × 25 cm.

Notice the pattern: four of the five now share the exact same free size — 40 × 30 × 20 — and easyJet's allowance is a superset of it. That convergence is recent (see the change history below), and it's precisely the size we build to.

In Europe, the personal item is the free underseat bag included in every fare, and the carry-on — the cabin bag — is the larger overhead-locker bag you pay extra for on most budget carriers. That's the opposite of what US-centric size charts assume, where a standard fare usually includes both.

Practically: the bag every Ryanair, Wizz Air, Vueling or Transavia ticket includes is the small one — 40 × 30 × 20 cm, and it must slide under the seat in front of you. The roughly 55 cm bag that goes in the overhead locker only comes with Priority-style bundles or higher fares. easyJet is the outlier in your favour: its free bag is already a generous 45 × 36 × 20.

So the money question isn't "what's the biggest bag I can bring?" — it's "can I pack everything into the free underseat size?". If the answer is yes, you fly on the base fare on all five airlines, every time. Our whole kit exists to make the answer yes: a hard-sided 40 × 30 × 20 backpack that compresses a week of clothes flat, plus a jacket and a neck pillow that carry whatever the backpack doesn't.

Two rule changes created today's 40 × 30 × 20 consensus, and both are recent.

Ryanair enlarged its free bag from 40 × 20 × 25 to 40 × 30 × 20 in summer 2025 — a rare loosening that added roughly a third more volume to the free allowance. Our dedicated Ryanair bag rules guide covers the full ruleset: the sizer, the fees, Priority, all of it.

Wizz Air reduced its free bag from 45 × 35 × 20 to 40 × 30 × 20 in November 2025 — a tightening that caught out plenty of regulars whose old "Wizz-approved" bags suddenly stopped fitting. Our Wizz Air cabin bag guide has the full details.

We keep the complete per-airline Q&As on those hub pages rather than duplicating them here — this page is the chart, the fee comparison and the change log. When an airline moves its numbers, the dated change log at the bottom of this page gets a new line the same week.

A 40 × 30 × 20 cm bag fits the free allowance on all five airlines this page tracks: it's the exact published size on Ryanair, Wizz Air, Vueling and Transavia, and it sits well inside easyJet's 45 × 36 × 20. In fact, every airline in the live chart above — Europe and USA — shows a green check for it.

That's why our compression backpack is built to the exact published 40 × 30 × 20 size. Not "about that size", not "fits most airlines" — the exact dimensions in the chart. Two hardshell halves and metal buckles squeeze your clothes flat between two rigid surfaces, so the packed bag measures what the empty bag measures. No soft-sided bulge creeping past the 20 cm depth line: the shell is the measurement.

The compression is manual — your hands, no pump, no battery, nothing to charge or break — and it's strong enough that you overpack above the rim on purpose, then cinch it all down flat. A padded sleeve takes a 14–15 inch laptop, which covers roughly 95% of laptops. It scores 4.8/5 across 677 reviews, mostly from people who fly the exact airlines in this chart.

Yes, a guaranteed free bag is coming — most likely from 2027. On 7 July 2026 the European Parliament approved the revised air-passenger-rights rules by 646 votes to 12, guaranteeing every passenger a free personal item of at least 40 × 30 × 15 cm. Final adoption is still pending; if the rules are finally adopted, they are expected to apply from 2027.

Two things worth understanding before the headlines oversell it. First, it's a floor, not a standard size: 40 × 30 × 15 is smaller than every free allowance in today's chart, so no airline has to shrink anything — the rule prevents a future race to the bottom rather than enlarging today's bags. Second, it isn't law yet: Parliament's approval is the big political step, but the text still needs final adoption before the countdown to 2027 starts.

We track this in the change log below and will update this page the day anything becomes binding. Until then, the July 2026 airline numbers above are what the sizer at the gate actually enforces.

Booking the bigger bag in advance is the cheap mistake; the gate is the expensive one. Which? put the average price of a paid cabin bag in December 2025 at £20.50 on Ryanair and £28.93 on Wizz Air — annoying, but survivable.

Turn up at a Ryanair gate with a bag that doesn't fit the sizer, though, and the fee is around €75, paid on the spot before the bag flies. And since November 2025, Ryanair pays its staff a €2.50 bonus for every intercepted bag, with the previous cap removed — so the person eyeing your backpack at boarding has a direct financial incentive to send it to the sizer.

The arithmetic writes its own conclusion. A bag that genuinely measures 40 × 30 × 20 costs you nothing extra on any airline in this chart — every trip, indefinitely. A bag that "basically fits" costs whatever the gate decides it costs, on the day you can least argue about it. We build for the first category: the exact published size, held by a hardshell that can't bulge past it.

Every dated change to this page's numbers, newest first.

7 July 2026 — the European Parliament approves the revised air-passenger-rights rules (646–12), guaranteeing a free 40 × 30 × 15 cm personal item. Final adoption pending; expected to apply from 2027.

December 2025 — Which? publishes average paid cabin-bag prices: £20.50 on Ryanair, £28.93 on Wizz Air.

November 2025 — Wizz Air reduces its free bag from 45 × 35 × 20 to 40 × 30 × 20. The same month, Ryanair raises its per-bag staff bonus to €2.50 and removes the cap.

Summer 2025 — Ryanair enlarges its free bag from 40 × 20 × 25 to 40 × 30 × 20.

Sources: each airline's own official baggage page (linked by name in the live chart above), Which? (December 2025), and the European Parliament plenary vote of 7 July 2026. Spotted a number that moved before we did? Tell us and we'll fix it the same day.