Pack Weight Calculator

How the categories are defined

Base weight is shelter, sleep system, pack, kitchen and clothing. Everything you would still carry with the food eaten and the bottles empty. Weigh gear as you actually pack it, stakes and straps included, because the small stuff is a real fraction of most builds.

Consumables are water and food. They are listed separately because they behave differently. Water weight comes off as you drink, which means the heaviest moment of every day is the tap. Food weight comes off at roughly 600 to 900 grams per person per day once modern trail calories are chosen well.

The pack category counts the bag itself. This trips up first-timers converting a household cupboard to a kit: the frame you buy to carry 18 kilos is only rational if you still need 18 kilos. Trim the load, then trim the bag that holds it.

Fuel sits inside the kitchen line and quietly distorts it. A gas canister carries its empty weight whether full or nearly empty, so long trips spread that penalty thin. Canister stove, liquid fuel or solid tablet choices shift the kitchen category by hundreds of grams either way. Weigh fuel as its own line first, then fold it into kitchen for the calculator.

A worked example

Take a standard two-night walk. Shelter 2,500 grams, sleep 3,200, pack 1,500, kitchen 1,200, clothing 1,800. That is a base weight of 10,200 grams, ten kilos before a single calorie is loaded.

Add 3,000 grams of water and 2,400 grams of food, and the total is 15,600 grams. Now the arithmetic gets useful: water and food are 5,400 grams of that, and it is the only part that shrinks. Everything else is a decision you can still edit on the driveway.

The comparison build is the ultralight sample: base 5,100 grams against that 10,200, for the same functions. Nothing on the difference came from one miracle purchase. It came from halves: a lighter shelter, a warmer-but-lighter sleep system, a smaller pack that only works because the base shrank first.

How to use this calculator

Weigh by category, not by whole pack. A cheap kitchen scale plus the gear list on each box gets honest numbers in twenty minutes. Where a maker publishes two weights — minimum and trail weight — use trail weight, because that includes the poles and features you will actually carry.

Fill the water line with the worst leg, not the average one. On hot Australian tracks the max distance between verified supplies sets the bottle count, and bottles weigh a kilogram a litre the same as the water inside them.

Round every category up rather than down. Small items — headtorch, repair kit, first aid, sunscreen — genuinely add hundreds of grams, and they never make the spec sheet. Then compare the total against your own strength, not a forum stranger's.

Log the three numbers once and reuse them. Write base, consumables and total in your trip note. Next season's builds then get compared against your own history, not someone else's forum post.

Interpreting your result

A widely used planning guide is that a loaded pack should stay under roughly 20 percent of body weight for sustained comfortable walking on mixed tracks. Above that, the uphill grades and river crossings take a real tax, and by evening your footstep accuracy drops — which is when ankles roll.

Judge base weight against the season, not the brochure. A winter build with insulation and rain gear can carry two kilos more than the summer version of the same kit and still be correct. The consumables line is where the winter penalty usually hides.

If the total is too high, cut in this order: consumables you can resupply or cache, kitchen redundancy, shelter weight, then sleep. Cutting sleep warmth last because miserable sleep makes light packs feel heavier than they are.

Accuracy, assumptions and limits

This tool sums what you enter. It cannot tell you whether you forgot the fuel, the rain jacket or the spare socks. The calculation is only as honest as the weigh-in, so weigh the actual packed bag at the end and reconcile any gap larger than half a kilo.

Worn clothing sits in a grey zone. Items on your body or in your pockets are technically not in the pack, but they are carried weight on the walk. Counting them in the clothing line, as this tool prefers, keeps your comparisons between builds consistent.

Nothing here replaces testing. A new build should walk a full loaded day — with the water line filled to the worst leg — before it earns a multi-day booking. The numbers predict comfort; a hill predicts the truth.

Hidden grams are the usual source of error. A stuff sack full of spares, a camera, a book and a repair kit can be half a kilo before anyone notices. Put them in clothing or kitchen, but put them in somewhere.