Will my bag fit? Carry-on size and bag fees, 16 airlines

The three bags, airline by airline

Every airline sorts what you carry into three bags. The personal item goes under the seat in front of you and is free on every fare. The carry-on goes in the overhead bin and is free on some fares and airlines only. The checked bag goes in the hold, with a weight limit and, almost everywhere, a fee. The grid gives the limits as each airline publishes them: inches for US airlines, centimetres for UK and European airlines, with the other unit converted by us. Click an airline for its fees, its exemptions and the date its page was read.

What your bags cost on a round trip

Bag fees are charged each way, per bag and per traveler, so a family of four with one bag each pays the first-bag fee eight times on a round trip. The calculator multiplies it out for you. It takes the fee table each airline publishes, the online or airport price where they differ, and removes the bags that a co-branded card, elite status or military service makes free, in the number the airline states. For airlines that price bags per flight, it shows the range they publish instead of guessing.

Paying online before the flight is cheaper on American ($5 less per bag) and on JetBlue when you pay more than a day ahead; Delta, Southwest, Alaska and Hawaiian charge the same everywhere. The full comparison, with the third bag and the free-bag rules, is on the checked bag fees page.

Why one tape measure against 16 rulebooks changes everything

Each airline publishes its own limits on its own page, in its own unit and with its own words: length by width by height, or linear inches, or a sizer at the gate described in centimetres. A traveler who flies one airline out and another home, or connects from a US flight to a European one, has to open six pages and convert every number. Articles that summarize them are usually written once and never updated, and several of the figures they repeat changed in 2026: every large US airline raised its checked bag fees between March and May, and one low-cost airline stopped flying altogether.

This site keeps one record per airline, read on the airline's own pages and dated, and runs your bag against all of them. Because the bag is tested in the orientation that suits it, as it would be pushed into a sizer, a bag that is a little long on one side but slim on the others is judged fairly. The answer says which side is over and by how much, which tells you whether to leave the outside pocket empty or to switch bags. The same records feed every page of the site, so a fee that changes is changed once and appears everywhere with its new date.

The site also says what it does not know. When an airline shows a fee only inside its booking tool, the calculator says so instead of inventing an average; when an airline's page could only be read on an archived copy, the airline's page here gives the date of that copy.

Liquids at the security checkpoint

At US airports the TSA rule is the same everywhere: containers of 3.4 ounces (100 ml) or less, in one quart-sized bag per passenger. In the UK the rule now depends on the airport. Heathrow, Gatwick, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Bristol, Belfast International have new scanners and say on their own pages that you can carry containers of up to 2 litres and leave them in your bag. Most other UK airports keep the 100 ml limit per container but no longer ask for the plastic bag. Choose your departure airport below.

Medicines and baby food or milk are allowed in larger amounts at every airport, in both countries. The TSA liquids page and the UK airport liquids page give the details and the exemptions.

Power banks and batteries

A power bank never goes in a checked bag, and it stays with you if your carry-on is checked at the gate. The limit is set in watt-hours, not in the milliamp-hours printed in large type on the pack: multiply the mAh by the voltage (usually 3.7 V) and divide by 1,000. A 20,000 mAh pack is 74 Wh, well under the 100 Wh limit. The power bank page converts your pack and lists the airlines that limit their number or forbid using them in flight.

Bag fee changes of 2026, with their dates

Each change applies to tickets bought, issued or changed from the date shown, as each airline words it; a ticket bought before keeps the old fee.

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