What a 7 kg Cabin Limit Actually Measures

A weight limit is only half a rule: it also matters whether it applies to each piece or to everything you carry. Some airlines publish the same number under both bases in the same tier.

Published 2026-10-25 · Updated 2026-10-25

One number, two rules

A limit of "7 kg" tells you how much you may carry only once you also know what is being weighed. Under a per piece basis, each item is weighed on its own: your carry-on may be 7 kg and your personal item may be 7 kg. Under a combined basis, the two are added together and the total must stay within 7 kg.

The difference decides real cases. A 6 kg carry-on and a 2 kg personal item pass a per-piece limit of 7 kg on both items. Against a combined limit of 7 kg the same load is 8 kg, and it is over. Neither traveller changed anything except which of the two rules was printed on their booking.

What the data shows

Our data holds 370 published allowances across 155 airlines. Of the 248 that publish a weight limit at all, 58 measure your pieces together and 190 measure each piece separately — so 23.4% of published weight limits are a combined figure.

How the 248 published weight limits are measured, plus the allowances that publish no weight at all
What the weight figure measures	Allowances
per piece	190
combined	58
Not published	122

The last row is not part of the 248: those allowances publish no weight figure at all. That is an absence, not a zero — we leave the cell empty rather than substitute another airline's number or an estimate.

Where the two bases meet

43 of the 155 airlines in our data publish at least one combined limit, 16 publish both bases somewhere, and 13 do it inside a single tier. The sharpest cases are below: the same airline, the same tier, the same number of kilograms — published once per piece and once combined.

Airline	Tier	Limit	Basis	Cabin
Bamboo Airways	Carry-on	7 kg	combined	economy
Bamboo Airways	Carry-on	7 kg	per piece	business
T'way Air	Carry-on	10 kg	combined	economy
T'way Air	Carry-on	10 kg	per piece	business

Read down the limit column: the number does not change, the rule does. Anyone comparing these rows by the number alone would conclude the two rules are equivalent, and they are not — under the combined basis the personal item is not a free extra, it eats into the same allowance.

How the number was produced

The count is computed at build time from the same rows the site checks bags against:

Take every allowance whose weight_kg is filled in.
Split them by the weight_scope column in the download, which is perPiece or combined.
Leave out the rows with no weight figure entirely — they belong to neither basis.

/data/airlines.csv carries both columns, so the count can be reproduced without recomputing anything: filter to tier = carryOn, group by weight_scope, and drop the empty weight_kg.

What our checker does with it

It does not quietly compare one bag against a combined limit. When the rule that applies to you is a combined one and you entered a weight, the result carries a caveat saying that the limit covers your carry-on and personal item together and that only one bag was checked. Piece count is checked only when you enter it; where you leave it blank the result says the piece count was not verified, rather than showing it as passed.

That is a disclosure, not a calculation. We still compare the weight you typed for one bag against the limit — we do not add your pieces up for you. Where a combined limit applies and you carry more than one piece, the two together must stay inside that limit, and that arithmetic is yours to do. Saying so is more useful than a verdict that looks more certain than it is.

What this article does not say

It is not a ranking. No airline is scored, ordered or graded, and nothing here implies one basis is better practice than the other.
No basis is automatically more generous. A combined 10 kg is more than a per-piece 7 kg if you carry one bag, and less if you carry two. Which one gives you more room depends on your own load, not on the basis.
Nothing here is verified line by line. Of the 155 airlines covered, 0 have been checked against the airline's own page; every row still carries needs_review = true. So this counts how airlines publish their limits, not what will happen at the gate.
An empty cell is not a zero. The 122 allowances with no weight figure do not have a weight limit of zero. Their airline did not publish one.

What those limits add up to when a bag is actually tested is a separate question, answered for one common bag across every airline in why a bag check has four answers. Every row behind these counts is downloadable from the dataset page.

Corrections

If a figure here does not match the airline's published page, the page wins. Write to us via the contact page and we will correct the data row rather than the count — the article recomputes itself from that row on the next build. How we handle corrections is set out in the editorial policy.