Receipt sizes: 58mm, 80mm and when to use A4

Receipt paper comes in a small number of standard widths, and the width decides your layout before you have written a word. Two sizes cover almost everything in the world: 58mm and 80mm rolls. The choice is not aesthetic — it changes how many characters fit on a line, and therefore whether your item names survive intact.

58mm: the pocket-terminal width

58mm rolls are what mobile card readers, taxi terminals and small handheld printers use. The printable area is around 48mm, which gives you roughly 32 characters per line in the standard font. That is enough for a price column and a short description, and not enough for anything else — long product names wrap or truncate, and two-column layouts get cramped. Design for 58mm by writing short item names and keeping the header to a line or two.

80mm: the shop-counter standard

80mm is the default for fixed point-of-sale printers in shops, cafés and restaurants. Printable width is about 72mm, or roughly 48 characters per line, which is the width most receipt layouts are quietly designed around: a description on the left, dot leaders in the middle, an aligned price column on the right. If you are designing a receipt template and have no constraint forcing you smaller, design for 80mm.

A4 and letter: when the receipt is a document

Once a receipt needs to be emailed, filed or attached to an expense claim, roll widths stop helping. A4 (or US Letter) gives room for full addresses, tax breakdowns, terms and a logo, and it prints on the office printer everyone already has. The convention is to keep the narrow receipt look — monospaced, aligned columns — inside a page-sized document, so it still reads as a receipt rather than a letter. That is also the sensible format for anything you export as an image or PDF.