What is base weight?
Base weight is the weight of your pack plus everything in it, minus consumables: food, water, and fuel. What you wear or carry on your body, like your shoes, hiking clothes, and trekking poles, doesn't count either.
That's the definition. The rest of this page covers why the number exists, how it relates to the other weights you'll see quoted, and how to work out yours.
Base, worn, consumable, total
Everything you take on a trip lands in one of three buckets:
- Base weight: the pack itself and all gear in or strapped to it that you won't eat, drink, or burn. Shelter, sleep system, cook kit, electronics, spare clothes.
- Worn weight: what's on your body when you start walking. Shoes, socks, shirt, hat, and by most conventions the trekking poles in your hands.
- Consumable weight: food, water, and stove fuel. It shrinks as you hike.
Total pack weight is base plus consumables: what's on your back when you leave the trailhead. You'll sometimes see skin-out weight too, which adds worn weight on top of that, but it comes up less often.
Why hikers compare base weight
Consumables depend on the trip. Five days of food weighs around 3 kg (6.6 lb) no matter how disciplined your gear choices are, and a long desert water carry can add 4 kg (8.8 lb) on its own. Worn weight mostly depends on the weather. Base weight is the part that stays the same from trip to trip, and it's the part you control at home when you decide what to buy and what to leave behind. Comparing gear lists on base weight isolates those choices from the conditions.
It's also the number the ultralight community organizes itself around. r/Ultralight describes itself as aiming at "a sub 10 pound base weight," which is about 4.5 kg.
The usual bands
| Style | Base weight |
|---|---|
| Traditional | over 9 kg (20 lb) |
| Lightweight | under 9 kg (20 lb) |
| Ultralight | under 4.5 kg (10 lb) |
Below 2.3 kg (5 lb) gets called super ultralight, mostly as a sport. These bands are conventions, not rules. They assume three-season solo backpacking; a winter list plays a different game, and nobody weighs your pack at the trailhead. Treat the bands as orientation, nothing more.
A worked example
A three-day summer trip, weights from a kitchen scale:
| Item | Weight | Bucket |
|---|---|---|
| Pack | 950 g | base |
| Tent (Durston X-Mid 1) | 795 g | base |
| Quilt | 650 g | base |
| Sleeping pad | 410 g | base |
| Stove, pot, spoon | 250 g | base |
| Water filter | 85 g | base |
| Headlamp, power bank, cables | 500 g | base |
| Spare clothes and rain jacket | 600 g | base |
| Trail runners | 700 g | worn |
| Hiking clothes | 800 g | worn |
| Trekking poles | 480 g | worn |
| Food, 3 days | 1,800 g | consumable |
| Water, 1 L | 1,000 g | consumable |
| Stove fuel | 100 g | consumable |
Add up the base rows and you get 4,240 g, so 4.2 kg (9.3 lb). Ultralight by the conventional cutoff, with about 300 g to spare. Total pack weight at the trailhead is base plus consumables: 4,240 + 2,900 = 7,140 g, or 7.1 kg (15.7 lb). The 1,980 g of worn weight counts toward neither number.
Or start from numbers you already have. Enter your totals and the calculator does the subtraction:
Base weight calculator
Weights in kg, decimals allowed. Base weight is what is left after the worn and consumable rows come off. The numbers below are the worked example above.
The loophole
Worn weight is where the bookkeeping gets gamed. Wear your puffy at the trailhead instead of packing it and your base weight drops 300 g, while your legs carry the same total. For your own planning this is harmless. When you post a list for review, reviewers spot it fast, so flag worn items honestly; the pack shakedown checklist goes into what they expect.
How to lower it
Weigh everything first, on a kitchen scale. Listed weights are often optimistic, and you can't cut what you haven't measured.
Then cut before you buy: duplicates, just-in-case items, clothes that never leave the pack. This part is free.
When you do spend money, start with the big three: shelter, sleep system (bag or quilt plus pad), and the pack. They're usually the heaviest single items on the list, so one swap there saves more than trimming twenty small things. Replace the pack last; once the rest is lighter, a smaller pack carries it comfortably.
Where a tool fits
A spreadsheet handles all of this. A gear tool just does the bookkeeping for you: TrailGearList splits every list into base, worn, and consumable weight automatically, shows per-section totals so you can see where the weight sits, and it's free with no list limit. Browse the public gear lists to see how other hikers' base weights break down, or start your own list.