Jetstar just did Australian travellers a favour but nobody wants to hear it.

Jetstar announced on Tuesday that from 2 February 2027 it will stop weighing carry-on bags, scrap the 7kg limit and start selling overhead locker space as a product called Priority Carry-on. Within hours the coverage had settled into a single note: another greedy airline, another fee, another thing Australians used to get for free.

That reading is lazy. It also gets the maths backwards.

The 7kg limit was never free

Here is the part the outrage misses. Jetstar already charged you for a full-sized cabin bag. It just charged you badly.

Under the current rules, a Starter fare gives you 7kg across two items. Everything counts. Your laptop, your handbag, your jacket if you are unlucky. Tip over that line and the airline sells you a +7kg top-up at around A$60* at check-in or the domestic gate, and A$85 at an international gate. Fail to buy it in time and the bag goes to the hold for A$120 domestically or A$170 internationally.

So the existing system does not give travellers a free cabin bag. It gives them a 7kg tightrope, then charges triple-digit sums to anyone who falls off it, usually at the worst possible moment, usually in front of a queue.

Priority Carry-on starts at A$25 one way. Launceston to Sydney comes in at A$25, Adelaide to Brisbane at A$26, Sydney to Melbourne at A$33, Perth to Bali at A$39 and Cairns to Tokyo Narita at A$52. Club Jetstar members take 20 per cent off. Anyone already holding a booking for travel after 2 February gets it added at no cost, and anyone who has already bought the +7kg option gets refunded.

Compare that to the punishment tier it replaces and the direction of travel is obvious. A passenger who currently pays A$85 at the gate to keep their bag will pay A$33 to fly Sydney to Melbourne with certainty, weight flexibility and priority boarding.

The scales are the real story

Removing the cabin baggage scales matters more than the fee.

Gate weighing is one of the most miserable rituals in Australian aviation. It punishes people for owning a heavy laptop. It turns cabin crew into enforcement officers. It creates the stand-off at the aerobridge that holds up the boarding queue while a family redistributes shoes into coat pockets.

Jetstar will now judge one thing, and that thing is size. Bring one underseat bag up to 40 x 30 x 20cm on any fare. Buy Priority Carry-on if you want a 56 x 36 x 23cm bag in the locker. The airline asks passengers to keep bags to around 10kg so they can lift them safely, which is a sensible cabin safety position rather than a revenue one.

There is an operational dividend here too. Jetstar ran 75 per cent on-time departures in June 2026, behind Virgin at 80.8 per cent and Qantas at 87.8 per cent. A boarding process that stops arguing about grams and stops playing musical chairs with locker space is a boarding process that closes the door sooner.

Who actually loses

Credit where it is due to the critics: somebody does pay more here. The genuine minimalist who currently walks on with a small backpack and a coat, weighs four kilos and uses the locker anyway will now either shrink to the underseat allowance or pay.

AirlineRatings CEO Sharon Petersen sees both sides of that ledger.

"Jetstar is following a path that Ryanair, easyJet and Wizz Air laid down years ago, and the pricing tells you how closely. Ryanair charges roughly A$10 to A$59 for Priority & 2 Cabin Bags at the time of booking. Wizz Air sits in a similar band. easyJet advertises from about A$11, though A$38 to A$67 each way is closer to reality on a busy route. Jetstar’s A$25 to A$52 lands squarely inside that range, so nobody should be surprised by the number itself.

"Travellers who pride themselves on packing light now face paying for the privilege, which is a genuine negative. But passengers who consistently tip over the 7kg limit without needing a full checked bag come out ahead. They can pack more, stop worrying about the gate scales and pay far less than a checked bag would cost them.

"Where Jetstar parts company with the European carriers is the base fare. Jetstar’s starting price is generally well above what Ryanair or Wizz Air can offer, largely because Australia lacks that level of competition and because wages, taxes and operating costs sit much higher here. Passengers should judge the change on the total fare, not the add-on in isolation."

That last point deserves emphasis, because it is the criticism worth making. Ryanair can charge for a bag and still sell you a seat for the price of a sandwich. Jetstar cannot, and it never claimed the change would push fares down. The honest complaint about Australian budget flying has always been the base fare, not the ancillaries.

The comparison nobody ran

Set Jetstar against the carriers it is copying and the picture flatters it.

Ryanair charges roughly A$10 to A$59 at booking, rising to A$38 to A$98 later, with a gate penalty near A$134 to A$143. Wizz Air runs about A$8 to A$98 online, roughly A$90 at the airport and around A$107 for a gate re-check. easyJet advertises from about A$11, realistically A$38 to A$67 on a busy route, and charges about A$92 at the gate with no option to buy the allowance at the airport at all.

Jetstar’s A$25 to A$52 launch pricing sits inside that band. Its penalty structure looks softer than Ryanair’s. Its free underseat allowance matches Ryanair’s dimensions exactly, which tells you precisely which playbook Jetstar opened.

Verdict

This is not philanthropy. Jetstar’s domestic arm posted A$462 million in underlying pre-tax earnings in 2025 on a 16 per cent margin, with ancillaries doing plenty of the work. Nobody should pretend the airline restructured its baggage policy purely to spare passengers the indignity of the scales.

But the change replaces an arbitrary weight rule with a clear size rule, replaces punitive gate fees with a cheaper up-front option, refunds people who already paid, hands existing bookings the product for nothing and removes the single most disliked interaction in the boarding process.

Australians are entitled to be angry about what it costs to fly domestically but they are aiming that anger at the wrong announcement.

*Excess carry on fees vary depending on the route taken. The number represents an average fee from a 3 hour flight.