How much to spend on a backpacking kit

Divide a budget by four and you will end up with a pack that is better than it needs to be and a pad that is worse than it should be. The four slots do not reward money equally, and — more importantly — they do not punish thrift equally either.

The rule: spend on the things that decide whether you sleep, and economise where the cost of being cheap is weight rather than safety. A heavy pack is an annoyance you feel in your legs at the end of the day. A cold pad is a night spent awake, and in the wrong conditions it is a night that goes somewhere worse than uncomfortable. Those are not the same category of mistake and they should not get the same share of the money.

Here is the whole catalogue as four price spans. The floor column is the cheapest item in each pool, the ceiling is the dearest, and the median is the middle of the pool rather than an average.

At the medians the shares fall out like this: the tent takes 37 per cent of the money, the bag 33, the pack 20 and the pad 11. That split is already uneven, and it is roughly the shape to aim at. What changes with the size of the budget is which way it tilts — down towards the sleep system when money is tight, and towards weight when it is not.

The pad: the best value in the kit

The narrowest price span of the four, €30 to €280, and the steepest return. Moving a pad from the floor of the pool to the median costs €100 and buys R-value, thickness and a night you sleep through. Nothing else in the kit converts a hundred euros into warmth that efficiently, because the pad is the only thing standing between you and a surface that conducts heat away all night. How R-values work is the detail.

The bag: warmth per gram

Money in a sleeping bag buys fill power — 650 to 950 across the down bags here — which means the same warmth in less weight and less packed volume. It does not buy a bag warmer than its rating. The bigger decision at any budget is down or synthetic : 71 of the 87 bags here are down, and the 16 synthetics are cheaper and hold more of their warmth when damp, at a cost in weight and packed size.

The tent: weight, and weather at the extremes

The largest single line in the budget at a €450 median, and the one where the money mostly buys grams. The floor of the pool is still a functional shelter: the lowest flysheet hydrostatic head here is 1,200 mm, which keeps rain out. What you gain going up is weight — the pool spans 540 g to 4,200 g — along with better poles, better geometry in wind and fabric that survives more seasons. If you walk in three-season weather and do not mind carrying an extra kilo, this is the honest place to save.

The pack: carry, not capacity

The cheapest slot at a €240 median, and the one where price buys the least at the top. A better pack has a better frame and belt, which move more of the load onto your hips, and lighter fabric. It does not carry more than the fit allows, and an expensive pack in the wrong back length is worse than a cheap one in the right one. Get the size right before you get the price right.

Three totals, split the way the argument above suggests. Every figure sits inside the price span of its pool, but treat them as targets rather than as guarantees that an item exists at exactly that number.

Read the rows across rather than down. At €600 the pad is already at 20 per cent of the money, nearly double its share at the medians, and the pack is down at 13 per cent — that is the whole argument in one row. At €1,200 the kit sits close to the median of every pool, with a little taken off the pack and given to the pad. At €2,000 almost all the extra goes to the tent and the bag, and it buys weight rather than warmth: the pad has already done its job by about €200.

The €600 kit is a real three-season kit. It is not a light one, and that is the trade you are making. A kit built at the floor of all four pools comes to €255, but that is a campsite-in-July kit and it will tell you so on the first cold night.

This is the single most useful sentence in the guide, so it gets its own section. The failure modes are not comparable. A cheap pack carries badly: your shoulders ache, you walk more slowly, you are tired at camp. All of that is recoverable with a night of sleep. A cheap pad loses you the night of sleep, and a sleepless, cold night degrades your judgement, your warmth and your ability to walk out the next day.

The arithmetic points the same way. Moving a pack from €60 to the €240 median costs €180 and buys comfort in carrying. Moving a pad from €30 to the €130 median costs €100 and buys R-value, which is the difference between a bag that works at its rating and a bag that does not. If you can only close one of those gaps, close the cheaper one.

Two pads here tie for cheapest at €30, and the lighter of the pair is also the lightest in the pool at 60 g. The thinnest are all closed-cell foam: indestructible, impossible to puncture, impossible to get wrong at three in the morning, and cold. They are excellent objects and a poor primary pad for anything near freezing. If budget forces one, the standard field fix is to put it under an air pad later rather than to replace it — you keep the toughness and add the R-value, because R-values of stacked pads add together.

Nothing says the four have to be bought in one week. Buy in the order the kit is chosen — pad first, then bag, then tent, then pack — because that is the order in which each decision constrains the next, and it is also the order that gets you outdoors soonest. A borrowed tent and a borrowed pack will see you through a season while you save; a borrowed sleeping bag rarely fits and a borrowed pad is rarely warm enough. The full argument for that order is in how to choose a backpacking kit .

Second-hand is genuinely good for tents and packs, where the wear is visible: check the pole sections, the zips, the seam tape and the hip belt foam, and you know most of what there is to know. It is riskier for down bags and air pads, where it is not visible. Down loses loft with age and with long compression, and a slow leak in an air pad announces itself at two in the morning rather than in the shop.

Whatever the total is, set it before you start looking and include the small things: pegs that are better than the ones in the bag, a dry bag, a sleeping bag liner if you want a few degrees of insurance. Then put the number into the finder , or browse the four pools directly from the gear list and see what the money actually reaches.