12 bag fee figures every flyer should know in 2026

This is the single rule that decides whether a fare is cheap, and it is the one most often lost between the booking screen and the arithmetic. Wizz Air's own fee data marks the charging method as per flight, per passenger, per bag. Ryanair's fee table annotates the checked bag rows as minimum and maximum charges per item per flight, and its Bulgarian table marks the same rows in Bulgarian. So two people flying to Milan with one 20 kg bag each are buying four bag events, not one. At a €39 return fare each and, say, €25 a bag, that is €178 for the pair, not the €128 the arithmetic gives you if the bag is counted once.

Both low-cost carriers here carry a free bag of 40 x 30 x 20 cm, about 24 litres, under the seat in front. Ryanair enlarged its version during 2025 from 40 x 20 x 25 cm, so a lot of retail listings still advertise the smaller size. Both carriers now exceed the 40 x 30 x 15 cm industry minimum. Pack inside that shape and every other figure on this page becomes irrelevant, which is why the packing checklists here start with measuring rather than with fares. Wizz Air adds a 10 kg cap and counts side pockets, so measure and weigh the bag packed.

The gap between a bag bought with the fare and the same bag bought at the airport is the largest in the table. A Wizz Air checked bag is €70 to €80 at the airport against a published online floor of €20 to €25, roughly triple. Ryanair charges €46 to €75 to put an unpaid checked bag in the hold at the gate and €70 to €75 for an oversize cabin bag. One published exception runs the other way: Ryanair's bag-drop desk is a flat €35.99 for the 10 kg tier, which can beat its own post-booking online price. That is the desk before security, never the gate.

LOT, Aegean and flydubai publish no European checked bag price, so the honest answer for those three is priced at booking. The Lufthansa, Austrian and SWISS euro figures of roughly €30 online and €60 at the airport rest on a Lufthansa Group fee sheet dated November 2023, so they carry medium confidence and are quoted here as a range rather than a price. Turkish Airlines publishes no euro excess rate at all; aggregators report roughly €8 to €32, and it is worth being precise about what that is: a per kilogram rate, not a bag fee. Putting it in a bag column would quietly turn it into a wrong number.

Both low-cost carriers price bags dynamically and both say so on their own pages. A sample of more than 1,500 real cabin bag prices found Ryanair's advertised price available on 0.3% of the flights looked at and Wizz Air's on 0.6%. Neither floor is a lie, but neither is a typical price either. Plan nearer €20 for a Ryanair trolley, which is a travel-press midpoint and not a Ryanair figure, and at least €25 for a Wizz Air 20 kg bag, which is Wizz Air's own published high-season floor. If the real quote comes in lower, the trip is cheaper than planned, which is the direction you want a surprise to run.