Every number here is traceable to the airline that published it, or labelled as an estimate. Below is the method, and a log of the 7 corrections we have made so far.
A size checker for airline bags. Pick a carrier, get its published carry-on and personal item limits, and check a bag you already own against them. It covers 11 US airlines and 16 international carriers, and 70 bags measured against those limits.
There is no account, no newsletter and no analytics. The site is funded by Amazon affiliate links on the bag recommendations, which is disclosed above every product list and in the terms.
Every figure links to the carrier’s own policy page, individually. Not a sources list in the footer — the link sits next to the number it supports, with the date we last read it. If a carrier changes a limit, the link is how you check us.
All 27 carriers were last re-read in August 2026. Four of them — United, Alaska, Hawaiian and Sun Country — serve their baggage pages as client-rendered JavaScript, so they have to be read in a real browser rather than fetched; we do that rather than fall back on what another site says.
Several airlines publish no personal item size at all. Delta, Southwest, Alaska and Hawaiian say only that the bag must fit under the seat. Where that is the case we say so in the heading, and the number we use to filter bags is labelled as ours.
This is the single most common failure on competing sites: an invented personal item dimension presented in the same typeface as a real one. A reader cannot tell which numbers to trust if the site does not distinguish them.
Both your bag and the airline limit are sorted largest-to-smallest before they are compared, dimension by dimension. That is the correct test for passing a rectangular box through a rectangular opening, and it is where most size checkers go wrong — comparing the numbers in the order you happened to type them rejects bags that genuinely fit. A 9 × 22 × 14 in bag fits a 22 × 14 × 9 in limit, and we score it that way.
Bags within an inch of the limit are marked borderline rather than pass or fail, and soft-sided bags get more slack than hard shells because a soft bag compresses into a sizer and a shell does not. Where an airline also publishes a linear-inch cap, that is checked separately — a bag can clear every individual dimension and still fail the total.
Manufacturer specifications, and only the ones stated as the external size including wheels and handles. Retail listings routinely quote the packing case instead, which is how a bag sold as a 20-inch carry-on turns out to be 22 inches at the gate. Where a manufacturer publishes only the case, the bag card says so. Where we cannot get a trustworthy external figure, the bag is left out.
Everything we have got wrong and fixed, newest first. Publishing this is uncomfortable, which is roughly the point: a site that has never been wrong about airline baggage policy is a site that is not checking.
We listed 18.5 × 13.5 × 8.5 in as Southwest’s published personal item size. Southwest publishes no personal item dimensions at all; its policy page lists example items and stops. The figure is a measurement of the under-seat cavity taken by a third party, not an allowance. It is now labelled as our estimate on every page, and the only under-seat size Southwest does publish — 18 × 10.5 × 10 for pet carriers — is noted alongside it.
We carried a 25 lb carry-on weight limit for Hawaiian, flagged in our own notes as the least certain figure on the site. Following the Alaska merger, hawaiianairlines.com now serves the same combined baggage page as alaskaair.com: 22 × 14 × 9 for all aircraft types, and no carry-on weight limit at all. Removed.
Virgin Atlantic’s cited PDF covered bookings made before 8 December 2019 and had been superseded; Iberia’s consumer baggage page had become a redirect loop; Breeze’s link went to the homepage rather than a policy page. All three now point at live first-party sources. The figures themselves were unchanged.
Both carriers state that length plus width plus depth may not exceed 45 inches, on top of the 22 × 14 × 9 box. Added. It is not binding at the maximum dimensions, but it is published and it belongs on the page.
We had repeated that United’s remaining sizers measure closer to 18 × 11 × 9 than the published figure. We went looking for the source and could not find one. It came out. The widely quoted 23 × 15 × 10 measurement traces to a single blogger in 2015 describing equipment removed in 2020, and we say so on the gate page rather than repeating it.
We had $65. United publishes $75 at the gate for tickets bought from 3 April 2026, against $45 prepaid and $50 in the lobby.
American removed bag sizers from every gate on 6 October 2025, keeping them at check-in. Added to the airline notes and to the gate enforcement page.
Send it to hello@airlinebagsizes.com with the carrier’s link and what the page now says. That is enough for us to fix it the same day, and it ends up in the log above. More on the contact page.
Last updated 2026-08-12.
Manufacturers publish dimensions inconsistently, and a “20-inch” spinner is almost never 20 inches once you count the wheels. Where a brand states dimensions including wheels and handles, that’s the number we use. Where it only publishes the case, we say so on the card. Airlines measure the outside of your bag — wheels, handles, straps and all. Anything marked borderline is down to the gate agent, and remember that a soft bag squashes into a sizer while a hard shell won’t.
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Limits verified August 2026 against each carrier’s published policy. Airlines change these without notice — always confirm before you fly. Spirit Airlines ceased operations on 2 May 2026 and is no longer listed.
Airline Bag Size Checker v1.0.15 · last updated 2026-08-12