The luggage questions, answered with tables

Before you buy a bag, you usually have a question — what size counts as a carry-on, whether it fits the airline you are flying next week, how to make a week's clothes fit in it, whether hardside or softside is the right call. This hub is the reference desk. Every guide leads with a direct answer in the first two sentences, backs it with a table or a numbered list you can actually use at the airport, and cites the airline policy pages and material data it draws from.

The two most important pages are the size guides, and they are the backbone of the whole site. The what-size-is-a-carry-onguide gives you the industry baseline — the familiar 22 × 14 × 9 inch (56 × 36 × 23 cm) standard — and explains why your bag can be "carry-on sized" and still get gate-checked. The carry-on-size-by-airline table is the one to bookmark: the real maximum dimensions and weight limits for the major US and international carriers in one place, because they genuinely differ and airlines change them. Both feed straight into the bags we recommend, so you never end up with a case that fits everywhere except the plane you booked.

The rest of the hub answers the questions that come up once you own a bag or are deciding between two builds: how to pack a carry-on for a full week without checking a bag, and hardside vs softside and the material comparison that decide durability and weight. These are deliberately the least monetized pages on the site — they exist to be genuinely useful and to be the kind of clear, cited reference that other sites link to. Where a guide reaches a buying decision, it points you to the matching roundup; it never pretends a link is anything other than a helpful next step.