Ryanair Baggage Allowance 2026: Free Bag, Sizer & Fees

Every Ryanair fare in 2026 includes one free personal bag of 40 × 30 × 20 cm that must fit under the seat in front of you — and there is no weight limit on it. That single sentence answers most of what people type into a search bar at 2 a.m. before a flight, so let's stamp it: verified against Ryanair's official cabin-bag rules in July 2026.

Everything else is optional extras. Priority & 2 Cabin Bags adds a second, larger bag — 55 × 40 × 20 cm, up to 10 kg — that rides in the overhead locker. Checked bags from 10 to 20 kg can be added during booking. And if a bag turns up at the gate bigger than what was paid for, the metal sizer settles the argument, and the fee is roughly £70–75 (about €75) per bag.

This page is our canonical Ryanair rules hub: the exact dimensions, the sizer mechanics, the fee figures, the EU law on the horizon, and a dated change log at the bottom. Every other Ryanwear guide links back here — when a rule moves, this is where it moves first.

Ryanair's free personal item in 2026 measures 40 × 30 × 20 cm — about 24 litres — and it comes with every ticket, including the cheapest fare. It must fit under the seat in front of you, and remarkably, Ryanair publishes no weight limit for it: only the size is enforced. If you can lift it, you can fly with it.

The size is newer than most guides admit. The free bag allowance was enlarged from 40 × 20 × 25 cm in summer 2025 — roughly 20% more volume — after years of the smaller limit frustrating basically everyone. That's the canonical change every page on this site refers back to, because half the internet still quotes the old dimensions. If an article, a bag listing or a well-meaning uncle tells you 40 × 20 × 25, they're a season out of date.

The practical consequence: a bag genuinely built to 40 × 30 × 20 now holds a long weekend uncompressed — and with a compression system doing the squeezing, a full week. That's why this size, not the paid 10 kg bag, is the one worth engineering around.

Ryanair's hand luggage rules for 2026 offer exactly one cabin upgrade: Priority & 2 Cabin Bags, which adds a 55 × 40 × 20 cm bag with a 10 kg weight limit on top of your free personal item, stowed in the overhead locker. It's sold per flight with finite cabin capacity, so treat it as a booking-time decision rather than a gate-time fallback.

Checked options come in multiple weight tiers, cheapest when added during booking. Pricing is dynamic by route and date, which is precisely why we don't print a fee table that would be wrong by Thursday — the sizer fee above is the one number that stays put.

Our honest take: for trips up to a week, the cheapest hand-luggage strategy on Ryanair isn't Priority — it's making the free 40 × 30 × 20 bag genuinely sufficient. That's a packing engineering problem, and it's the exact problem our compression backpack was built to solve: two hardshell halves press a week of clothes flat, and the outside never grows past the published size.

Probably, but not before 2027. On 7 July 2026 the European Parliament approved revised air-passenger-rights rules by 646 votes to 12, guaranteeing every flyer a free personal item of at least 40 × 30 × 15 cm. Final adoption is still pending — the finished text has yet to be settled — and if it completes, the rules are expected to apply from 2027.

Here's the part most coverage misses: the EU's proposed guaranteed size is smaller than what Ryanair already gives you. 40 × 30 × 15 cm is five centimetres shallower than Ryanair's current 40 × 30 × 20 free bag. So the law would set a floor under the allowance rather than raise it — useful insurance against future shrinkage, but not a reason to wait until 2027 to buy a better bag.

We track this in the change log below. If the final text shifts the dimensions, the date, or anything else, this section and the log are updated the week it happens — that's the deal with a page that calls itself canonical.

The Ryanair bag sizer is a metal frame at the gate with the free bag's exact 40 × 30 × 20 cm dimensions — and your bag has to fit inside it as presented, fully packed, straps and all. There's no averaging, no "it's mostly in", no squashing it through with a knee. If it doesn't drop in, it's oversized.

Getting caught costs roughly £70–75 (about €75) per bag in 2026, charged on the spot — typically more than a checked bag booked in advance would have cost, and often more than the bag itself. It is, by a wide margin, the most expensive way to learn your bag's true packed dimensions.

What actually fails the sizer: soft bags that bulge past the 20 cm depth once stuffed, external pockets packed fat, water bottles in side sleeves, and wheels or fixed handles that were never counted in the "internal dimensions" the manufacturer advertised. What passes: bags whose outer shell physically cannot exceed the published size — which is exactly the design brief our backpack's two hardshell halves were built to.

Assume strict, everywhere. Enforcement genuinely varies by airport, base and individual agent — travellers swap stories of breezing through one week and getting sized the next — but the incentive structure only points one way: the per-bag staff bonus for catching oversized bags was raised to €2.50, uncapped, in November 2025. The word "uncapped" is doing real work there: the incentive scales with every bag caught. More checks, not fewer.

So the honest answer to "how strict is Ryanair with bags?" is: strict enough that hoping for a lenient agent is not a plan. The gate you fly from tomorrow may be relaxed; the one on the way back won't be. The only strategy that works at every airport is arithmetic — a bag that measures inside 40 × 30 × 20 cm when packed passes every sizer, every time, regardless of who's on shift.

That's why we keep saying "built to the exact published size" instead of promising you anything about gate agents. The agents aren't the variable you control. The bag is.

Measure your bag packed, at its fattest points, and include wheels, handles and external pockets — the sizer doesn't care what the label said, only what's standing in front of it. Height, width and depth all count, taken at the widest bulge, not at the seam.

The classic mistake is trusting the manufacturer's number, which is usually the empty or internal size. A soft "40 × 30 × 20" daypack visibly swells once you actually fill it — converting a compliant bag into a fee at the exact moment it's holding all your stuff. Fixed handles and wheels on mini-trolleys are the other silent killer: they're part of the bag, so they're part of the measurement.

The five-minute home check: pack for a real trip, stand the bag up, and run a tape measure over each dimension at its most swollen point. If any number reads over, repack flatter or accept that you're gambling. A structured bag sidesteps the whole exercise — rigid shells can't swell, so the packed size and the published size are the same number. That is, verbatim, the design principle of our compression backpack.

This is the dated record every other Ryanwear guide quotes — one canonical wording per change, so any fact you read on this site traces back to a date here.

Summer 2025 — Ryanair enlarged the free personal item from 40 × 20 × 25 cm to 40 × 30 × 20 cm, roughly 20% more volume (~24 litres).

November 2025 — the per-bag staff bonus for catching oversized bags was raised to €2.50, uncapped.

7 July 2026 — the European Parliament approved the revised air-passenger-rights rules, 646 votes to 12, guaranteeing a free 40 × 30 × 15 cm personal item; if finally adopted, expected to apply from 2027. Final adoption pending — tracked here.

July 2026 — every figure on this page re-verified against Ryanair's official cabin-bags page, the primary source for all dimensions and fees above.

When something changes, the log gains a line and the sections above are rewritten the same week. If you're reading a Ryanair rules article without a change log, you're reading an archive.