Ryanair’s £70 Gate Fee Is Avoidable: The Underseat Cabin Bags That Actually Fit in 2026

Stand near a Ryanair gate at Stansted on a Saturday morning and you’ll see it happen within minutes. Someone gets pulled aside, their bag wedged into the metal sizer, and it doesn’t drop in. Then comes the maths nobody wants to do at 6am: pay the gate fee, or kneel on the floor and start stuffing a hoodie into your partner’s bag. That fee is now up to £70 each way. For a return trip, two people, you’ve spent more on luggage than on the flights.

The fix is dull but it works. Buy the right underseat cabin bag once, learn the numbers, and you never play that game again.

I’ve flown the budget carriers more times than I’d like to admit over the past year, mostly short breaks and the odd work trip, and the bag rules have quietly shifted under everyone’s feet. The free allowance is bigger than it was in 2023. The enforcement is stricter. And the gap between what Ryanair gives you and what easyJet or Jet2 gives you has grown wide enough that buying the wrong shape of bag genuinely costs money. So here’s what actually fits, what to buy, and where people still get stung.

What each airline actually gives you free in 2026

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 three carriers most Brits use stand right now.

Ryanair. Your free bag must fit 40 x 30 x 20 cm and slide under the seat in front. There’s no weight limit, which sounds generous until you remember the dimensions are the tightest of the lot. Wheels and handles count towards the measurement. Miss it and the gate fee runs up to £70. If you want anything bigger, you’re paying for Priority or a separate 10kg bag.

easyJet. Noticeably kinder. The free under-seat bag is 45 x 36 x 20 cm, up to 15kg. That extra 6cm of width and height doesn’t read like much on paper, but in practice it’s the difference between three days of clothes and four or five. An easyJet-sized bag won’t fit Ryanair’s sizer, though. Worth burning into memory.

Jet2. The outlier, and the reason a lot of families quietly prefer it. You get a proper overhead cabin bag, 56 x 45 x 25 cm up to 10kg, plus a personal item of 40 x 30 x 20 cm under the seat. Two bags, free, no upgrade to buy. For a week away that’s a different category of packing altogether.

So the order of generosity, free-bag-wise, runs Jet2, then easyJet, then Ryanair trailing at the back. None of this is secret. The airlines publish it all – Ryanair’s bag policy page spells out the sizer rules, and easyJet’s baggage help does the same. But almost nobody reads it until they’re standing at the gate.

The underseat cabin bag size that travels everywhere

If you fly more than one of these airlines, don’t buy to the biggest allowance. Buy to the smallest. A bag built for Ryanair’s 40 x 30 x 20 cm clears every other carrier’s under-seat rule automatically, so one bag covers all of them. Buy an easyJet-sized bag and you’ve locked yourself out of Ryanair.

You’ll see a lot of bags sold as “40x20x25” rather than 40x30x20. That’s the older Ryanair spec, and it still fits. Sort the numbers and a 40 x 20 x 25 bag sits comfortably inside the 40 x 30 x 20 envelope once you turn it the right way. Manufacturers just haven’t all updated their labels, and honestly the 40x20x25 shape is a slightly nicer one to pack because it’s taller and narrower.

This is the single most useful thing in this piece, so I’ll say it plainly: a soft-ish bag rated 40x20x25cm is the one to own. It’s the lowest common denominator that keeps you legal on Ryanair, easyJet, Jet2 and most of Wizz Air too.

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

There are three broad types and they suit different people. I’ve used all three and I’ve got opinions.

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 underseat 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. The Metz 20L and the Equator X backpack both sit bang on 40x20x25, both cost somewhere around £25 to £35 depending on the sale, and both have lasted me through a year of abuse. The trade-off is that the structure itself eats a centimetre or two of internal space. You’re paying for predictability with packing volume.

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 (if it has them) actually roll. But for an underseat 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 underseat bag be a bit disposable. That’s my contrarian take and I’ll stand by it.

The bags I’d actually buy

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

For most people, the Cabin Max Metz 20L. It’s the boring right answer. Around £30, true to its 40x20x25 size, one big main compartment and a front pocket, and it survives being over-stuffed. Nothing about it is exciting. It just works, trip after trip, which is the entire point of a bag like this.

If you carry a laptop or do city breaks where you’re walking miles, get a backpack version instead of a holdall – the Cabin Max Equator X or any 40x20x25 rucksack with padded straps. Carrying twelve kilos by one shoulder strap across a city is genuinely miserable, and you only learn that lesson once. A backpack spreads the load and frees your hands for the boarding pass and the passport juggle.

On the tightest budget, the Narwey foldable at around £18, or honestly the Linea underseat bag that Sports Direct sells 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 anyway. Wheels make sense at 56cm. At underseat size they’re dead weight.

Holdall or backpack? Match it to the trip

This is the question people agonise over, so here’s the short version. 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 of walking from the gate to passport control to the train, your back knows about it.

A backpack costs you a little internal room but 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. I switched to a 40x20x25 rucksack for city trips about a year ago and wouldn’t go back. The holdall now only comes out when I know I’ll barely be walking.

Where people still get caught out

The dimensions are only half the battle. A few things trip people up again and again.

Weight is the quiet one. Ryanair doesn’t weigh the under-seat bag, but easyJet’s 15kg and Jet2’s 10kg are real and occasionally checked. Fill a bag with shoes and toiletries and you’ll clear 10kg faster than you’d think. I’ve watched someone reweigh a “small” bag at the Jet2 desk and come in at 11.4kg, which meant the hold or a repack on the floor.

External pockets count. If your bag is exactly 40 x 20 x 25 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 gate sizer cares. Pack the outside flat.

And the sizers themselves are not always kind. Some are slightly undersized, some have a lip that catches a soft bag’s handle. A bag with a centimetre of give is worth more than a bag that measures dead-on, because the dead-on bag fails the moment you put anything in it. Buy a touch under the limit, not right at it.

The other thing: don’t trust a bag just because the listing says “Ryanair compliant”. Plenty aren’t, or are working off the old spec. Check the actual centimetres against 40 x 30 x 20, every time. 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, not a guarantee.

Is the EU about to make all this irrelevant?

Maybe, eventually, but don’t hold your luggage for it. In June 2025 the European Parliament backed a rule that would force airlines flying within and to the EU to let every passenger bring a small cabin bag free, on top of a personal item. There’s also an industry agreement among European carriers on a standard personal-item size of 40 x 30 x 15 cm, so at least the under-seat number should start converging.

But the law still needs sign-off from member states, the timelines keep slipping, and Brexit means UK-departing flights sit in a grey zone anyway. Translation: by all means follow the story, but the bag you buy this summer needs to meet today’s Ryanair sizer, not a rule that might land in 2027. Money Saving Expert and the travel desks at the broadsheets are tracking it if you want the running commentary.

A bit of packing common sense

None of the bag advice matters if you pack like you’re moving house. Underseat travel forces discipline, and that’s mostly a good thing. Roll, don’t fold. Wear the bulkiest jacket and the heaviest shoes onto the plane. 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 actually getting four outfits out of one small holdall.

For the journey itself, the stuff that earns its place in a tiny bag is the stuff that keeps you sane: a charged power bank (the

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