Eurowings Hand Luggage 2026: Free 40x30x25 Bag & Fees

Every Eurowings fare in 2026 — BASIC, SMART and BIZclass — includes one free small underseat bag of 40 × 30 × 25 cm (15.7 × 11.8 × 9.8 in). It must be stored beneath the seat in front of you, and Eurowings publishes no weight limit for it. On BASIC, that box is the entire free allowance — verified against Eurowings' own hand-baggage policy in July 2026.

The large cabin bag — 55 × 40 × 23 cm, up to 8 kg — is where the fares part ways. SMART includes one, BIZclass includes two, and BASIC includes none: there it's a paid add-on from roughly €18–21, depending on which paragraph of the official page you believe. More on that below.

Get it wrong at the gate and a non-compliant bag travels in the hold, for a fee travellers and fee trackers put at about €50 in 2026. This page holds the exact dimensions, the real price ladder, the pending lawsuit and a dated change log.

Eurowings calls it the small underseat bag — kleines Handgepäck — and its own examples are a laptop bag, a purse or a small backpack. The limit is 40 × 30 × 25 cm, a roughly 30-litre box, and only the size is policed: the 8 kg cap applies to the large cabin bag, not to this one. If you can lift it and it slides under the seat, it flies.

Two bonuses almost nobody reads: a lap infant (0–23 months) earns a second free underseat bag, and a duty-free shopping bag may come aboard additionally, stowed under the seat. German rulebooks reward the people who finish them.

The depth is the quiet luxury here. Until 31 August 2021 this bag was 40 × 30 × 10 cm — then BASIC lost the free trolley and the underseat bag grew to 25 cm deep in exchange. Whatever you think of the trade, 25 cm is the deepest free under-seat allowance of any European carrier in our size table.

Here the famous precision wobbles: Eurowings' own baggage page quotes two different prices for the same add-on. The fare table and upgrade section say the BASIC cabin trolley starts "from €18 / £16"; the size-and-weight section of the same page says from ~€21. Independent fee trackers report the ladder that actually matters: roughly €18 at booking, ~€35 adding it later online, and ~€50 at the airport or gate — all verified July 2026.

Now the arithmetic that should decide your booking: a 23 kg checked bag starts at ~€18 — the same "from" price as the 8 kg cabin trolley — and about a euro more than the 12 kg bag at ~€17. Eleven extra kilos for roughly one euro.

Our honest take: up to a week, the cheapest move on BASIC is buying neither bag. Make the free 40 × 30 × 25 box carry the whole trip instead — an engineering job rather than a shopping one, and the job our compression backpack was designed for.

Eurowings' BASIC allowance is currently being argued about in a Düsseldorf courtroom. On 25 November 2025, Germany's consumer federation vzbv sued Eurowings at the Landgericht Düsseldorf, claiming that charging for anything beyond the free 40 × 30 × 25 bag violates EU law under a 2014 European Court of Justice ruling. The case is still pending as of July 2026. A parallel vzbv case against Vueling has already produced a first-instance default judgment against the airline — currently under appeal, so not yet final.

Meanwhile the EU has actually finished its homework: Parliament and Council negotiators agreed the air-passenger-rights reform in June 2026, the Parliament approved it on 7 July by 646 votes to 12, and the Council gave the final green light on 13 July. Now that it's adopted, it guarantees every passenger a free underseat personal item of at least 40 × 30 × 15 cm, applying from roughly mid-2027.

Here's the anticlimax: Eurowings already beats that floor by 10 cm of depth, free on the cheapest fare. No Ryanair-style enlargement needed — the law is insurance, not an upgrade.

Eurowings doesn't leave you guessing — the official wording is unusually blunt: "we will check the size and number of bags for every passenger", restrictions "are strictly enforced during boarding", and the FAQ openly discusses what happens "if your hand baggage does not fit into the sizer". When a German airline writes a sentence like that, believe it.

Traveller reports from 2025–26 add the texture: size is checked fairly consistently — especially for BASIC passengers, whose boarding pass shows no cabin bag — while weight is rarely actually weighed unless a bag looks heroic. Enforcement varies by airport: Düsseldorf and Hamburg are strict, Cologne checks at check-in and sometimes the gate, Berlin runs consistent size checks on BASIC, Munich is hit-or-miss.

One genuinely humane clause: on full flights, a compliant large cabin bag may be gate-checked into the hold free of charge and returned at the carousel. Compliant is the load-bearing word — the only plan that works at every airport is a bag inside the published number.

Eurowings' official wording is procedural rather than priced: hand baggage that doesn't comply — oversize, over 8 kg, or one piece too many — is taken at the gate and travels in the hold for an additional fee. The number the airline leaves off that page, travellers and independent fee trackers fill in: around €50 at the gate as of July 2026. That is the airport price of the trolley you declined to buy for ~€18 at booking, charged at the least convenient possible moment.

The airport is where every price grows. Checked bags cost up to ~50% more at the counter than online, and excess baggage runs ~€15 per additional piece and per kilogram — a double multiplier that compounds faster than you can repack.

The cheap exits, in order: add a checked bag online up to two hours before departure (12 kg from ~€17, 23 kg from ~€18) — or need no paid bag at all, because everything you packed already lives inside the free 40 × 30 × 25.

Yes, with room to spare — and this is arithmetic, not optimism. A bag measuring 40 × 30 × 20 cm (15.7 × 11.8 × 7.9 in) sits inside Eurowings' 40 × 30 × 25 cm limit on every axis, with 5 cm of depth left over. It passes the sizer because it is smaller than the box, not because anyone at the gate felt generous.

The 5 cm margin matters more than it looks. Reports agree that rigid trolleys with nothing to give are what fail the metal sizer, while bags with honest dimensions drop straight in. Our backpack doesn't need to squeeze: two hardshell halves hold it at exactly 40 × 30 × 20 whether it's empty or pressed full — packed size and published size are the same number, comfortably inside the allowance.

Inside those ~24 litres: a week of clothes compressed flat by hand — no pump, no battery — plus a padded sleeve for a 14–15 inch laptop. Eurowings' own example of a permitted item is "a small backpack". This is that, engineered.

The dated record, one canonical line per change — because half the internet still quotes the pre-2021 rules.

31 August 2021 — BASIC lost the free 55 × 40 × 23 trolley; in exchange the free underseat bag grew from 40 × 30 × 10 to 40 × 30 × 25 cm, and the trolley became an add-on from €10 — with priority boarding thrown in as a sweetener, and carry-on baggage named "one of the main drivers of delays". By 2026 that add-on starts at ~€18–21: roughly doubled in five years.

25 November 2025 — vzbv sues Eurowings at LG Düsseldorf over the BASIC allowance; pending as of July 2026.

15 January 2026 — Lufthansa-Group power-bank rules: maximum two per passenger, carried on your person or under the seat, no onboard use or charging.

7 July 2026 — the European Parliament approves the EU air-passenger-rights reform, 646 votes to 12, guaranteeing a free 40 × 30 × 15 cm underseat item from 2027; the Council gave final adoption on 13 July, and Eurowings' free bag already exceeds the floor. July 2026 — every figure re-verified against Eurowings' official hand-baggage policy; the gate-check fee reported at ~€50.