Planner paper sizes: A4, A5, Letter and Half Letter compared

Four sizes cover almost everything, and the choice usually comes down to two questions: what your binder takes, and what paper your printer has.

The four, exactly

Size	Millimetres	Inches	PDF points
US Letter	215.9 x 279.4	8.5 x 11	612 x 792
A4	210 x 297	8.268 x 11.693	595.276 x 841.890
A5	148 x 210	5.827 x 8.268	419.528 x 595.276
Half Letter	139.7 x 215.9	5.5 x 8.5	396 x 612

The points column matters more than it looks. A PDF page box is measured in points, one seventy-second of an inch, and it is the number that decides whether a file prints at the right size. If a planner PDF claims to be A5 and its page box reads 612 x 792, it is a Letter file and it will print small.

A4 or Letter

Geography decides this one. North America uses Letter; almost everywhere else uses A4, including the UK, Ireland, most of Europe, India, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.

They are annoyingly close. A4 is 5.9 mm narrower and 17.6 mm taller than Letter. Close enough that a file will print on the wrong one without obviously failing, and different enough that the margins end up wrong.

Printing a Letter file on A4 means the fit is driven by width, so the artwork scales to about 94% and you end up with 17.6 mm of unused paper at the bottom. Nothing looks broken. Your 12.7 mm margins have become 11.9 mm, the writing lines have shrunk from 7.5 mm to 7.05 mm, and the printer has added its own centring so the top and bottom no longer match.

This is worth stating plainly because the free planner market does not currently serve A4 at all. Every free weekly planner PDF we inspected while building this site was a Letter file, including the ones whose pages mention A4 in the print instructions.

A5 or Half Letter

The small sizes are the ones people actually agonise over, and the difference is real:

• A5 is 148 x 210 mm. Taller-looking, narrower.
• Half Letter is 139.7 x 215.9 mm. 8.3 mm narrower and 5.9 mm taller than A5.

They are not interchangeable in a binder, because the hole patterns are entirely different.

If you already own an organiser, it decides for you. If you are starting from nothing, two things are worth knowing.

Half Letter halves perfectly. Two Half Letter pages side by side occupy exactly 792 points on a landscape Letter sheet, which is exactly what a Letter sheet is. Zero slack, one cut line.

A5 nearly does. Two A5 pages occupy 839.06 points against A4’s 841.89, leaving exactly 1.00 mm. The reason is that ISO rounds A5 to 148 mm rather than the 148.5 mm that halving A4 would give. Centred, that is half a millimetre per side and invisible.

Both are easy. Only one is perfect.

Ring and disc patterns

This is where the sizes stop being interchangeable in practice.

Six-ring is brand-fragmented. The A5 pattern is six holes in two groups of three, 19.05 mm within each group and 69.85 mm between the groups, spanning 146.05 mm. The Personal pattern is also two groups of three but 19.05 mm within and 50.80 mm between, spanning 127.00 mm. Franklin Covey Half Letter binders use a completely different seven-ring pattern at 25.4 and 38.1 mm. None of these accept each other’s inserts.

Disc-bound is unusually well standardised. The mushroom-hole pitch is 25.40 mm, exactly one inch, across Levenger Circa, Staples ARC, TUL, Atoma and the Happy Planner. A page punched for one fits all of them. On Half Letter that gives eight holes spanning 177.80 mm with a 19.05 mm gap at each end; on Letter, eleven holes spanning 254.00 mm with 12.70 mm at each end. Those end gaps landing on exact fractions of an inch is a good sign the model is right rather than approximated.

Why scaling between sizes is a bad idea

A planner is judged on how much room there is to write, and scaling destroys exactly that.

Letter to A5 is roughly a 0.65 linear reduction. A 7.5 mm writing line becomes 4.9 mm. The narrow-ruled minimum for legible adult handwriting is about 6.35 mm, and the community consensus band is 6 to 8 mm with 7 mm most cited and 5 mm rejected outright. A scaled A5 planner is below the floor before you have written anything.

The margins scale too, so a file designed with 12.7 mm of clearance ends up with about 8 mm, and anything punched or trimmed loses more.

Every size on this site is laid out from scratch for its own page box. Some combinations genuinely do not fit as a result, and we say so rather than shipping them cramped: a seven-day hourly grid on A5 portrait works out at 16 mm per day, which is about three handwritten characters, so it is not offered. On A5 the hourly grid works in landscape, and the vertical weekly works as a two-page spread, which is what ring-binder planners have always done.

Printer margins

Every file here uses 12.7 mm, half an inch, on all four sides. That is not a design preference; it is the smallest single number that clears every printer specification we could find.

The published unprintable margins vary more than most people expect. Brother mono lasers reserve 4.23 mm all round. HP Officejets report 3.3 mm on Windows but 12 mm at the bottom on macOS and Linux. Several Epson models reserve 15 mm at the bottom on cut-sheet media. Canon auto-duplex takes another 2 mm off the top. A margin that works on one of those is not a margin that works on all of them.

Which to pick

• Printing on Letter paper, no binder: Half Letter, 2-up, cut down the middle.
• Printing on A4 paper, no binder: A5, 2-up, cut down the middle.
• You own a binder: whichever it takes. Measure the ring spacing if you are unsure.
• You want the most room to write: Letter or A4, full size.
• Going in a bag every day: A5 or Half Letter.