Packing List Template

How to use this packing list template

1. Pick the trip. Beach, cruise, camping, road trip, business, international, carry-on only, city break, ski, theme park, college move-in, or travelling with kids. The trip type changes what is on the list, not just how it looks — a cruise adds a non-surge power strip and magnetic hooks, camping adds the stove and the bin bags, carry-on only takes the full-size bottles away and gives you a quart bag instead.
2. Say how long, how many of you, and whether there is a washing machine. These three are what the quantities come from. Ticking laundry on a long trip is the single biggest change you can make to the size of your bag.
3. Edit it. Every quantity has a plus and a minus, every row has a cross to remove it, and there is a box at the bottom for the things only you take. Tick items off as they go in the bag and the progress bar keeps count.
4. Print it or share it. Four layouts: a straight checklist, a two-column compact version, one grouped by bag so the medication does not end up in the hold, and a per-person grid with a tick column for each traveller. Copy link saves the whole thing into a URL you can send or bookmark.

Why this packing list template is different

Search for a packing list template and you get one of three things: a gallery of pretty designs you customise in someone's editor behind a login, a spreadsheet you copy into your own Drive, or a PDF a blogger made once. They differ in typeface. Underneath, they are the same list of nouns.

• The quantities are filled in. This is the whole point. One of the most popular printables in the results literally instructs you to "write the number of each item needed" — that arithmetic is the hard part of packing and everyone leaves it to you.
• Laundry changes the answer. A fortnight with one wash mid-trip packs like eight days, not fourteen. Nothing static can know that, so nothing static accounts for it.
• Twelve trip types change the contents, not the artwork. A ski list and a beach list should not be the same list of nouns in different colours.
• There is a carry-on liquids check. Every list on the internet tells you to pack shampoo, sunscreen and hand sanitiser. None of them mention the rule that governs whether you are allowed to. This one counts them and cites TSA.
• No account, no watermark, no email. The PDF is clean, the tool embeds on your own site for free, and nothing asks you for an address.

How the quantity math works

The starting point is the 5-4-3-2-1 packing rule — five sets of socks and underwear, four tops, three bottoms, two pairs of shoes, one hat — the heuristic most seasoned travellers quote and the thing Google's own "people also ask" box asks about. It is a good rule with one flaw: it assumes everyone's trip is the same week. So the tool scales it.

First it works out your packing horizon, which is how many days of clothes you actually have to carry rather than how many days you are away:

• No laundry — the horizon is the whole trip.
• One wash mid-trip — half the trip, plus a buffer day. Seven days becomes five.
• Washing every few days — four days, however long you are away.
• The horizon stops at fourteen days either way. Past a fortnight everybody does laundry, and a list that printed twenty-one pairs of socks would be wrong in a way nobody would follow.

Then the horizon drives each row, with climate setting how many wears you get out of a garment:

• Tops = horizon ÷ wears per top, where a hot-weather top is worn once, a mild one one and a half times, a cold one twice — you layer in the cold, so you need fewer tops and more midlayers.
• Bottoms = horizon ÷ wears per pair: two days in the heat, three in mild weather, four in the cold.
• Underwear and socks = horizon + 1. The spare is the travel day, and it is the thing people most regret not having.
• Shoes start at two pairs, and gain one for a trip with a smart evening in it and one for a trip with an activity.
• Layers and outerwear come from the climate directly; swimwear and something smart appear only when the trip type calls for them.

Everything is clamped so nothing silly prints — a minimum of two tops however short the trip, a maximum of ten however long it is.

The carry-on liquids panel is the one figure that comes from outside. TSA's 3-1-1 rule limits carry-on liquids, aerosols, gels, creams and pastes to containers of 3.4 ounces (100 millilitres) or less, all of which must fit inside one quart-size bag, and the bag is per passenger — so four of you means four bags. Medication and infant nourishment are exempt. The tool counts the liquid-flagged items on your own list. A US quart is 946.353 mL, so nine containers filled to the 100 mL maximum is the arithmetic ceiling — and since the bag also has to close flat, the real number is lower. The tool says so rather than inventing a capacity.

Three worked examples

A seven-day cruise. Hot weather, swimming, and at least one formal night. The tool returns seven tops, four bottoms, eight pairs of underwear and eight of socks, three pairs of shoes (the extra being the smart ones), two swimsuits and two smart outfits, plus a light layer for the air conditioning. On top of the core list it adds the boarding pass and muster card, a lanyard for your key card, motion-sickness tablets, an over-the-door organiser for a cabin with no surfaces, magnetic hooks because the walls are steel, and a non-surge power strip, which matters because cruise lines confiscate surge protectors at the gangway.

A four-day beach trip, carry-on only. Switch to the carry-on preset and the full-size shampoo and body wash come off the list, replaced by solid bars and a quart bag. At four mild days with no laundry you get four tops, two bottoms, five pairs of underwear and socks. The liquids panel drops to a handful of items, which is the entire reason the preset exists — the bag is not the constraint, the bottles are.

A five-day trip with three people. Quantities are per person, so the totals multiply by three — except the shared things. A first-aid kit, a pram and a car seat count once for the group, not three times, which is the arithmetic every family packing list gets wrong. Switch to the per-person layout and you get one row per item with three tick columns, so you can see whose is still missing.

Frequently asked questions

What is the 5-4-3-2-1 packing method?

Pack five sets of socks and underwear, four tops, three bottoms, two pairs of shoes and one hat. It is a rule of thumb for roughly a week, and it works because it forces you to commit to a small number of things that go together rather than packing options. Its limit is that it is one fixed answer: it does not know whether you are away for three days or twelve, or whether there is a washing machine. That is exactly the gap this tool fills — it takes the same shape and scales it to your actual trip.

What is the 3-5-7 rule in packing?

A tighter variant of the same idea, usually quoted as three bottoms, five tops and seven sets of underwear for a week. The numbers differ from 5-4-3-2-1 because the two rules assume different laundry habits, which rather makes the point: any fixed rule is a guess about a trip it has not seen. Set seven days with no laundry here and you will get five tops, three bottoms and eight pairs of underwear, sitting between the two rules and derived rather than remembered.

How many outfits do I need for a seven-day trip?

For mild weather with no laundry: five tops, three bottoms, eight pairs of underwear, eight pairs of socks, two pairs of shoes. If you will do one wash mid-trip that drops to four tops, two bottoms and six pairs of underwear and socks — noticeably less bag for one hour in a laundrette. The tool shows both; change the laundry setting and watch the numbers move.

Is this a shipping packing list or a commercial packing list?

No, this is the travel kind — what to put in your suitcase. If you came here looking for the shipping document that lists a consignment's contents for a carrier or customs, you want our shipping label template and, for freight, the freight class calculator. The two share a name and nothing else.

Is it really free, and do I need an account?

Free, no account, no email, no watermark on the PDF, and no limit on how many lists you make. The tool runs entirely in your browser — nothing you type is sent anywhere, which is also why the share link works by encoding the list into the URL rather than saving it on a server.

Related tools

• To-Do List Template — everything that has to happen before you leave, sorted by priority with a live completion percentage.
• House Cleaning Checklist — for coming home to a house you actually want to walk into.
• Grocery List Template — sorts itself by aisle, which is what you want for the shop before a road trip or the first shop in a rental.
• Daily Schedule Template — the hour-by-hour plan for the days the trip is built around.
• Browse all free tools by Sarah Chen →

Sarah's picks for packing that survives the airport

A list solves the "what did I forget" problem. It does not solve the two that come after it, which are where everything goes and whether the bag it goes in holds its shape at a gate sizer. After a decade of packing for conferences, these are the categories that matter:

• Best Laptop Bags — the bag that stays with you, holding the laptop, the documents and the medication. The one specification worth paying for is a lay-flat laptop compartment, because it is the difference between walking through security and unpacking on a metal table while a queue forms behind you.
• Best Backpacks for Work — for carry-on-only trips, structure beats capacity. A framed backpack keeps its dimensions against a sizer; a soft holdall swells past them the moment it is full, which is how a free bag becomes a gate fee.
• Best Noise-Cancelling Headphones — the most-used thing in any carry-on and the easiest to forget, since it usually lives on your desk rather than in the bag.

Around those: a label maker on bags, chargers and cables is the cheapest way to stop a family arriving with four identical black cases and no idea whose is whose; an expanding file folder keeps passports, printed confirmations and receipts flat and in one place; a dated planner is where the flights, the check-in times and this list belong together; and a pocket journal is how next year's version of this list writes itself, because the things you wished you had packed are only memorable for about a week. If you print the sheet, plain printer paper is enough for one trip, while laminating it turns it into the list you reuse with a dry-erase marker every time.

Methodology & sources

• What is sourced and what is judgement. One figure on this page comes from outside: the TSA liquids rule. Everything else — wears per garment, the laundry horizon, the buffer day — is a scaled version of the widely published 5-4-3-2-1 packing rule, and it is judgement, not a standard. No authority publishes a canonical garments-per-day table and any page claiming one has invented it. Every quantity on screen has a plus and a minus next to it for exactly that reason.
• Carry-on liquids. TSA, Liquids, Aerosols, and Gels Rule — containers of 3.4 oz (100 mL) or less, all inside one quart-size bag, one bag per passenger, with medication and infant nourishment exempt. Read live on 25 September 2026. The nine-container figure is pure arithmetic on a US quart (946.353 mL ÷ 100 mL), presented as a volume ceiling rather than a capacity, because the bag has to close.
• Airline baggage limits are not modelled. They vary by carrier, route and fare, change without notice, and no single table is right for everyone. Check your own airline. The carry-on preset is about what goes in the bag, not what size the bag may be.
• Tested on every build. 26 fixture cases cover the quantity engine at both laundry settings and all three climates, the clamp boundaries at one day and sixty, the liquids count and its per-passenger bag arithmetic, shared-versus-personal totals, the packed percentage, and preset composition. Every figure quoted in the copy above is pinned to a fixture, so the page and the tool cannot drift apart.
• PDF generation uses jsPDF (MIT-licensed) from the jsDelivr CDN, rendering to US Letter. Tick boxes are drawn as vector rectangles rather than font glyphs, so they print crisp at any zoom and paginate cleanly on a long list.
• Reviewed annually, because the 3-1-1 rule is the kind of thing that changes as scanner technology rolls out.

Note: Quantities are a guideline, not a standard — edit any of them. Check your airline's own baggage limits, and for international trips the entry rules on medication and food. About Sarah Chen · Last reviewed September 25, 2026.

Embed this tool on your site

Free for travel blogs, tour operators, cruise and camping sites, relocation and student services, HR and travel-policy pages, and anyone who keeps writing the same packing advice. Required attribution is included in the snippet. No fee, no signup, no analytics attached to the embed.

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