Underseat Cabin Bag Rules 2026: Ryanair Quietly Got Bigger and Most ‘Approved’ Bags Are the Wrong Shape

The most useful sentence in this article is a set of numbers: 40 x 30 x 20 cm. That is now the free under-seat allowance on Ryanair, on Wizz Air, and for Jet2’s second bag. It is the shape the whole budget end of European flying has quietly standardised on, and if you own a bag cut to it, the sizer at the gate stops being a threat.

What almost nobody has caught up with is that this is a change. Ryanair moved from 40 x 30 x 15 cm to 40 x 30 x 20 cm in September 2025 and swapped out its airport gauges to match. A third more space, free, on the cheapest fare. And yet walk into any luggage shop this autumn and half the bags on the shelf still carry a “Ryanair approved” tag printed against a spec from three years ago.

So people are doing the worst of both things. They’re buying to an old, tighter number and packing less than they’re entitled to, or they’re buying to easyJet’s roomier one and getting caught out at Stansted. The fix takes ten minutes and one purchase.

The bag sizer is only the first toll booth of the trip. If you’re collecting a hire car at the other end, the same playbook waits at the rental desk – our car hire excess insurance guide explains how to cover a £1,200 excess for about £2 a day.

What each airline actually gives you free right now

This is the bit most people get wrong, because they remember a number from a few years ago and assume it still holds. It doesn’t. Here’s where the carriers most Brits use stand as of August 2026.

Airline	Free under-seat bag	Weight limit	Second cabin bag
Ryanair	40 x 30 x 20 cm	None stated	55 x 40 x 20 cm, 10kg, paid (Priority)
easyJet	45 x 36 x 20 cm	15kg	56 x 45 x 25 cm, paid or with certain seats and fares
Jet2	40 x 30 x 20 cm	Part of 10kg allowance	56 x 45 x 25 cm, 10kg, free
Wizz Air	40 x 30 x 20 cm	10kg	55 x 40 x 23 cm, 10kg, paid (Wizz Priority)

Ryanair. Tightest of the four, but no longer the punishing outlier it was. There’s no stated weight limit on the free bag, which sounds generous until you try carrying 11kg of it through Alicante. Wheels and handles count towards the measurement. Miss the sizer and the gate fee runs to around £70 each way, and Ryanair has been open about paying ground staff a small bounty for every oversize bag they catch, which is not a policy designed to produce lenient judgement calls.

easyJet. Still the kindest on the free bag at 45 x 36 x 20 cm, up to 15kg. Those extra centimetres of width and height don’t read like much on paper, but in practice they’re the difference between three days of clothes and four or five. An easyJet-sized bag will not fit Ryanair’s sizer. Burn that into memory.

Jet2. The reason a lot of families quietly prefer it. You get a proper overhead cabin bag at 56 x 45 x 25 cm up to 10kg, plus a personal item under the seat. Two bags, no upgrade to buy. For a week away that’s a different category of packing altogether, and it’s worth pricing a Jet2 flight against a Ryanair one with Priority added before you decide which is actually cheaper.

Wizz Air. Matches Ryanair’s 40 x 30 x 20 cm but adds a 10kg cap that Ryanair doesn’t have. Anything bigger needs Wizz Priority.

The airlines publish all of this. Ryanair’s bag policy page spells out the sizer rules and easyJet’s baggage help does the same. Almost nobody reads either until they’re standing at the gate. For the wider picture across all carriers, our full guide to the 2026 hand luggage rules covers what each airline now allows.

The one under-seat cabin bag size that travels everywhere

Buy to the smallest allowance, not the biggest. A bag built to 40 x 30 x 20 cm clears every carrier in that table, because three of the four use exactly that number and the fourth is more generous. One bag, every airline, no thinking required.

This is where the old advice has gone stale, including advice we gave earlier in the year. For a long time the answer was a 40 x 20 x 25 cm bag, because that was Ryanair’s spec and it slipped inside everyone else’s. It still technically clears the current sizer – sort the numbers and 40, 25, 20 fits inside 40, 30, 20 if you turn it the right way. But you’re now carrying a bag that’s 5cm narrower than you’re allowed on the airline with the tightest rule in Europe. That’s roughly a pair of trainers of wasted volume, on every trip, for no reason at all.

So: 40 x 30 x 20 cm. Written on the bag, checked with a tape measure when it arrives, not taken on trust from the listing.

One caveat on that tape measure. Buy a centimetre or so under the limit rather than dead-on. Gate sizers are metal frames that get kicked around a terminal for years, some have a lip that catches a soft handle, and a bag measuring exactly 40cm empty measures 41cm the moment you put a jumper in it. The bag with a little give beats the bag with none.

Soft, structured or foldable – the shape matters more than the brand

There are three broad types and they suit different people.

Foldable holdalls are the cheap, cheerful option. They pack down to nothing, weigh almost nothing themselves, and cost about twenty quid. Narwey makes the one everyone’s seen on TikTok, and it does exactly what it claims – squashes into the sizer because there’s no rigid frame fighting you. The downside is they’re floppy. Pack one badly and it bulges past the limit; pack it well and it swallows a surprising amount. For occasional flyers who mostly do hold luggage and just want a backup, this is all you need.

Structured under-seat bags, the ones with a semi-rigid base and a proper opening, are the sweet spot for regular short-break flyers. They hold their shape, so the airline’s sizer is predictable, and they don’t collapse into a heap when you put them down. Cabin Max is the name that comes up most here, and deservedly. Prices sit somewhere around £25 to £35 depending on the sale. The trade-off is that the structure itself eats a centimetre or two of internal space. You’re paying for predictability with packing volume, and for most people that’s a good trade.

Then there’s the premium end. Antler, Samsonite and the like will happily sell you a beautifully made cabin bag for north of £100. They’re lovely. The zips are better, the fabric’s tougher, the wheels actually roll. But for an under-seat bag that lives under a seat and gets kicked for two hours, I think it’s money in the wrong place. Spend that £100 on the hold bag you’ll keep for a decade, and let the £30 under-seat bag be a bit disposable. That’s my contrarian take and I’ll stand by it.

What I’d actually buy

Stripping it back to what I’d hand a friend who asked.

For most people, a structured 40 x 30 x 20 cm holdall in the £25 to £35 bracket, from a brand that has actually updated its spec to the current Ryanair number rather than reprinting an old tag. Cabin Max, Aerolite and Bange all sell to it. Nothing about these bags is exciting. They just work, trip after trip, which is the entire point.

If you carry a laptop or do city breaks where you’re walking miles, get a backpack version instead. Carrying twelve kilos by one shoulder strap across Lisbon is genuinely miserable, and you only learn that lesson once. A backpack spreads the load and frees your hands for the boarding pass and passport juggle. Check the depth carefully on these, though – padded back panels and chunky straps eat into the 20cm dimension in a way the product photo never shows.

On the tightest budget, a foldable at around £18, or the own-brand under-seat bags Sports Direct and Mountain Warehouse sell for not much more. Neither will last forever. Both will get you through a stag do or a couple of weekends without you caring if they come back scuffed.

The one I’d skip: anything marketed as a “Ryanair-approved trolley” with little wheels. The wheels and rigid handle eat into your 20cm depth, the cases often measure right at the edge of legal, and you’ve added a kilo of empty bag for the privilege of dragging something that’s too small to be a real suitcase. Wheels make sense at 56cm. At under-seat size they’re dead weight.

And don’t trust a bag because the listing says “Ryanair compliant”. Plenty aren’t, or are working off the old spec. Which? has tested cabin luggage against the airline sizers and found bags sold as compliant that simply weren’t, which tells you the label is marketing rather than a guarantee.

Holdall or backpack? Match it to the trip

A holdall carries more for its size because there’s no harness stealing space, and it slides into the sizer flat, which gate staff like. But you carry it on one shoulder, and after twenty minutes from the gate to passport control to the train, your back knows about it.

A backpack costs you a little internal room and saves your spine. For a beach week where you taxi door to door, the holdall wins. For a city break – Lisbon, Krakow, Seville, the kind of trip where you’re on your feet from the moment you land – the backpack is the better tool every time.

What actually happens at the gate, and what to do about it

The dimensions are only half the battle. Here’s the sequence, because knowing it takes most of the panic out of it.

Gate staff eyeball the queue. If your bag looks borderline you get asked to put it in the sizer. If it doesn’t drop in cleanly you’re offered a choice: pay the gate fee and it goes in the hold, or make it fit. Nobody is obliged to give you a second attempt, but in practice most staff will let you have thirty seconds on the floor to redistribute things. Use them.

Weight is the quiet trap. Ryanair doesn’t weigh the under-seat bag, but easyJet’s 15kg and Wizz’s 10kg are real and occasionally checked. Fill a bag with shoes and toiletries and you’ll clear 10kg faster than you’d think.

External pockets count. If your bag is exactly on spec when empty but you’ve crammed a water bottle into a side mesh pocket so it bows out, that bulge is part of the measurement as far as the sizer cares. Pack the outside flat.

And the cheapest escape route at the gate is almost always your own body. A coat isn’t luggage. Neither are the contents of your pockets. If you’re a centimetre over, the answer is to wear the fleece and stuff the charger in a jacket pocket, not to hand over seventy quid. That’s the one reason winter flights are easier than summer ones: you’re allowed to wear an enormous amount of your packing.

The autumn problem nobody plans for

Under-seat flying is easy in July and awkward in November, and the reason is bulk rather than volume. Summer clothes are thin. A week of them genuinely compresses into 24 litres. Add a jumper, boots and a proper coat and the same wardrobe stops fitting, which is why a bag that felt roomy in Faro in August feels hopeless in Krakow in December.

Two habits fix most of it. Wear the boots and the coat onto the plane, always – a pair of walking boots eats about a fifth of a 40 x 30 x 20 bag. And go merino rather than cotton for base layers, because one merino jumper does the work of two cotton ones and takes up less than half the space. It isn’t cheap. It’s cheaper than a gate fee, and it earns its keep for years.

Half term and the Christmas market run are also when the family maths changes. Four people on Ryanair with Priority added, twice, is not obviously cheaper than four people on Jet2 with two free bags each – and our guide to cheap family holidays makes the same point about comparing the total rather than the headline fare. Price the whole basket. Airlines rely on you not doing it.

Is the EU about to make all this irrelevant?

Closer than it was, but not yet. After more than a decade of stalled talks, EU member states and Parliament negotiators reached a deal on air passenger rights in June 2026 which, among other things, requires the fare shown to a passenger to include the right to a personal item and a cabin bag. Euronews reported the agreement at the time.

The timeline is the catch. Airlines get a transition period to rebuild their pricing systems, which puts real-world effect somewhere in 2027 rather than this winter. Expect the carriers to comply by restructuring fares rather than by giving anything away – the bag becomes “included” and the base fare goes up. That’s what happened every previous time a low-cost airline was made to bundle something it used to sell.

Brexit also leaves UK-departing flights in a grey zone nobody has cleanly resolved. Follow the story if you like. The bag you buy this autumn still needs to meet today’s Ryanair sizer.

A bit of packing common sense

None of the bag advice matters if you pack like you’re moving house. Under-seat travel forces discipline, and that’s mostly a good thing. Roll, don’t fold. Decant toiletries into 100ml bottles – the kind you find in Boots or Wilko for a couple of quid – rather than carrying full-size everything. A packing cube or two genuinely helps, not because they’re magic but because they stop your bag turning into a bulging mess that fails the sizer on shape alone.

If you want the clothing side sorted properly, our summer holiday wardrobe edit and the Italian summer style guide both work to a cabin-bag-only brief, and they’re more useful than any bag for getting four outfits out of one small holdall.

For the journey itself, the things that earn their place in a tiny bag are the ones that keep you sane. A charged power bank is top of that list, and we’ve done the capacity maths on which bricks are worth carrying in our festival power bank guide. If you’re flying with a laptop, the thickness of the machine matters as much as the bag – our roundup of the best laptops under £400 flags which ones are slim enough to disappear into a 20cm-deep bag. And if you’re travelling with children, a tablet loaded before you leave the house is worth more than any toy; we’ve compared the options in our kids’ tablet guide.

Packing a life into too little space is a transferable skill – our uni room essentials piece applies the same ruthlessness to student halls.

Measure the bag you already own this week, before you book anything. Plenty of people will find they’ve been travelling under-packed for a year. A few will find they’ve been one bored gate agent away from a £70 bill.