Best carry-ons that fit Ryanair's size limit

The allowance — get it from Ryanair, not from us

We are not going to print the dimensions here, and you should be wary of any guide that does.

Ryanair's cabin baggage rules change, they differ between the free under-seat bag and the larger Priority bag, and getting them wrong costs you money at the gate rather than costing us anything. We tried to read the figures from Ryanair's own baggage policy so we could cite them; the airline's site does not serve its content to us, and we are not prepared to republish numbers we could not verify at the source.

So: check ryanair.com before you fly, and measure your bag against what it says today. What follows is about which bags survive that measurement, which is a question we can answer.

What actually matters

Measured packed, not empty. Almost every bag sold as "Ryanair compliant" is compliant empty. Soft-sided bags gain one to three centimetres of depth when full, and that is exactly the dimension the gate sizer is tightest on. This is the single most common way people end up paying at the gate.

Wheels and handles count. The published dimensions of a bag often exclude them. The airline's do not.

The sizer is the ruler. Cabin crew measure against a physical frame, not a tape. A bag that is technically 55.5 cm does not go in.

How we chose these

We do not test bags. We go through outlets that measure them, and we look for one thing in particular: whether the quoted dimensions are the packed dimensions or the empty ones.

This guide is currently unfinished for a specific reason, stated here rather than hidden: we have not been able to verify the current allowance at the source, and a bag recommendation for a size limit we cannot confirm is worth nothing. The picks go in when that is fixed.

What we are leaving out

Expandable bags where the expansion cannot be zipped away, and anything whose manufacturer quotes dimensions excluding the wheels.