The best guitar cases under $100

What the $100 line buys

A guitar case comes in three types and only one of them exists under $100. A hard case is a rigid shell — wood or moulded plastic — and starts around $140. A polyfoam case is a rigid-ish shell that weighs closer to a bag, and starts around the same. Everything below that is a gig bag: padded fabric with straps.

That is not a problem for most guitars. A bag protects against dust, scratches, rain and the knocks of being carried, which covers what actually happens to a beginner’s guitar. What it does not do is survive something stacked on top of it, a freezing car, or an airline. If any of those is in your guitar’s future, this is the wrong price band — and the full cases and gig bags page covers the hard and polyfoam options above it.

Padding depth is the only number that means anything

Gig bag listings are full of adjectives and short of figures. “Thick padding” and “heavy duty” are not specifications. The one figure that tells you whether a bag is a bag or a sleeve is padding depth in inches or millimeters, and most listings at this price do not publish it.

Our budget pick does: 0.4 inches. That is modest, and it is a real number, which is more than the rest of the sub-$30 market commits to. The Gator 4G series does not publish a depth; what it publishes instead is a rigid-backed panel over the body and a fit list, which is another way of telling you the same thing.

Buy the bag that matches the body shape

This is the mistake that costs guitars. A gig bag holds the instrument at the body and at the headstock, and the padding is placed for a specific outline. Put a Stratocaster in a dreadnought bag and the horns sit against unpadded fabric while the neck floats. Put a bass in a guitar bag and the headstock hangs past the end of the padding, which is exactly where a dropped case breaks a neck.

That is why the same series appears three times above. It is not padding out the page: the acoustic, electric and bass versions are genuinely different cuts at the same $84.99, and buying the wrong one undoes the point of buying a decent bag at all.

Two things a bag does not protect against

Humidity. A gig bag slows humidity change slightly and stops none of it. For a solid-top acoustic in a dry winter house, what cracks the top is the air rather than an impact, and the fix is a case humidifier and a hygrometer rather than a better bag. Our guitar humidifier page covers the one acoustic failure that is not economically repairable on a beginner guitar.

Cold. Lacquer checking — the fine crazing on guitars that went from a freezing car into a warm room — is a temperature problem. No bag at this price insulates meaningfully. Letting the case come up to room temperature before opening it costs nothing and prevents it.

When to spend more

Three situations justify the next price band. If the guitar is worth more than about $400, the case should match the risk. If it travels in a car with other gear stacked around it, a rigid shell is the only thing that helps. And if anyone other than the owner will handle it — a school, a band room, a checked bag — buy a hard case and accept the weight.

For a first guitar bought from the under-$200 page, none of those apply, and an $85 bag is already a meaningful proportion of the instrument. The $29 option is the right answer more often than this category likes to admit.

Every price on this page is read from the live listing by our daily price check, and the date it was read is printed under each buy button. Prices move, and a page that quotes a number without saying when it was true is not worth reading — so if a pick has drifted over the cap since the last check, the button will tell you before you click it.