So, the other day I got this thought stuck in my head, you know? Like when you see something in a movie or hear a phrase a million times. This time it was “a bag of money”. You see it all the time – bank robberies, ransom drops, people lugging these sacks around. And I just started wondering, how heavy actually is a bag of money?
It sounds simple, but then you think, what kind of bag? How much money? What kind of bills? It got me curious enough that I decided to figure it out. Just a little thought experiment, really, something to satisfy my own nosiness.
My Process: Figuring Out the Heft
First things first, I needed some basics. How much does money weigh?
- Weight per bill: I didn’t have stacks of cash lying around to weigh, obviously. So, I did the next best thing and looked it up. Turns out, the US Bureau of Engraving and Printing says any US bill – doesn’t matter if it’s a $1 or a $100 – weighs about one gram. That made things easier.
- What’s “a bag”? This was trickier. What do people mean? I decided to go with the classic movie trope: a million dollars. Seems like a standard big score amount, right? And they always seem to use $100 bills because it looks cooler and takes up less space.
- Doing the math: Okay, so $1,000,000 in $100 bills. That means you need 10,000 individual bills ($1,000,000 / $100 = 10,000).
- Weight of the cash: If each bill is 1 gram, then 10,000 bills is 10,000 grams. That translates to 10 kilograms.
Okay, 10 kilos. That’s about 22 pounds. Honestly, that was less than I pictured sometimes. You see folks struggling with these bags in films.
But Wait, There’s the Bag!
Right, the money isn’t just floating there. It’s in a bag. How much does the bag add?
This depends entirely on the bag, of course. Is it one of those canvas bank deposit bags? A duffel bag? A briefcase?
I grabbed an old canvas tote bag I had, similar to what you might see used for coin transport sometimes, and threw it on my kitchen scale. It was maybe half a pound, like a quarter of a kilo. A decent-sized gym duffel bag, the kind you could stuff that much cash into? I weighed one of those too. That was closer to 2 pounds, maybe around 1 kilogram, give or take, depending on how sturdy it is.
The Grand Total (Roughly)
So, you take your 10 kilograms (22 pounds) of hundred-dollar bills, and you add maybe another kilogram (around 2 pounds) for a sturdy duffel bag.
Total weight = Around 11 kilograms, or roughly 24 pounds.
Now, that’s not nothing. It’s like carrying a toddler or a big bag of dog food. You’d feel it. But maybe not the back-breaking weight some movies portray unless they’re really exaggerating or the character is just weak.
Of course, if that bag was full of, say, $20 bills instead of $100s? You’d need five times as many bills (50,000 of them!). That would be 50 kilograms, or 110 pounds, plus the bag. Now THAT would be heavy. Suddenly the movie struggles make more sense if they’re dealing with smaller denominations.
Anyway, that was my little investigation. Just went down a rabbit hole of curiosity, did some basic searching and math. Nice to have a better sense of what “a bag of money” actually means in terms of weight. Cleared that little question mark floating in my head.
