US paper sizes: Letter, Legal, Tabloid and more

Office paper sizes

Sizes are given as width by height of an upright sheet.

Tabloid and Ledger are the same sheet. The name Ledger is used for the landscape orientation, 17 by 11 inches.

Engineering drawing sizes

Engineering sheets are named with the letters A to E. Size A is Letter and size B is Tabloid; each next size doubles the one before.

Architectural sizes

Architectural sheets use whole-number ratios of 4 to 3 and 3 to 2 and are slightly larger than the engineering sheets with the same letter.

How to use the charts

Use the inch values when you order in North America: they are the defined sizes. Use the millimetre values to check whether a sheet fits a folder, frame or printer that is specified in metric units.

The millimetre values are exact conversions at 25.4 mm per inch, shown with one decimal. Letter is exactly 215.9 mm wide.

Where the sizes come from and why they do not scale

North American office sizes are conventions defined in whole and half inches. The engineering sheets A to E are covered by the ASME standard for drawing sheets, and the architectural sheets follow a second convention with their own proportions. The inch values on this page come from the media size list of the Printer Working Group, which printers and print software use.

An A series sheet keeps its shape when it is cut in half. North American sheets do not. Letter has a side ratio of about 1.29, Tabloid of about 1.55. Doubling a sheet therefore alternates between two shapes.

In practice this means that a Letter page enlarged to Tabloid leaves a margin on one side or loses part of the page. Set the scale by the side that must fit.

Worked example: a Letter document on A4

A document laid out for Letter is 215.9 mm wide and 279.4 mm tall. A4 is 210 mm wide and 297 mm tall. The page is 5.9 mm too wide for A4.

Scaling to fit the width needs a factor of 210 divided by 215.9, which is about 97 percent. The printed page is then about 271.8 mm tall and leaves about 25 mm of extra white space at the bottom of the A4 sheet.

Common mistakes

• Assuming Legal is wider than Letter. Both are 8.5 inches wide; Legal is 3 inches taller.
• Treating ANSI C and Arch C as the same sheet. ANSI C is 17 by 22 inches; Arch C is 18 by 24 inches.
• Printing a Letter file on A4 at 100 percent. The sides are cut off or the printer shrinks the page without telling you.
• Relying on size names that are not defined consistently. This page leaves out sizes such as Government Letter and Junior Legal, for which the sources disagree.

• A4 compared with Letter

Sources and checks

The values in the chart are the nominal values of the standards and official documents listed below. Last checked against the sources on September 28, 2026.

North American sizes are defined in inches. Millimetre values are conversions at 25.4 mm per inch, rounded to one decimal.

Inch dimensions are taken from PWG 5101.1; Letter, Legal, Tabloid, Statement and Executive were also compared with the Microsoft list. The engineering sizes were not checked against the text of ASME Y14.1, which is not freely available.

Sizes for which the sources disagree or that could not be confirmed, such as Government Letter and Junior Legal, are left out.

• PWG 5101.1-2023, Media Standardized Names 2.1 (IEEE-ISTO Printer Working Group)

Used for: Dimensions of North American, engineering, architectural, ISO C, envelope and JIS B sizes as used by printers and print software.

• Microsoft Learn, Paper sizes (Windows print constants)

Used for: Second reference for Letter, Legal, Tabloid, Statement, Executive and JIS B sheet dimensions.

• ASME Y14.1-2020, Drawing Sheet Size and Format (ASME catalogue entry)

Used for: Title and current edition of the standard behind the engineering sheet sizes A to E. The catalogue entry lists no dimensions.