Experts with over 180 years of combined medical experience present this first aid kit checklist for your EDC (Everyday Carry), IFAK (Individual First Aid Kit), and emergency go-bags. The best first aid kits are made, not bought in one package, so this is a prioritized list based on where and how you’ll carry your personal kit, explanations of why items were included (or not), and links to our favorite products and free lessons.
This guide is for self-reliant people who want to prepare for injuries that are more serious than daily scrapes and/or for situations where professional medical care might not be available — such as natural disasters, rural car accidents, SHTF, or getting lost and injured on an outdoor expedition.
Context matters! This is not a watered-down OSHA first aid kit you might keep in an office or classroom, for example, because an office typically isn’t preparing for the wide range of emergencies that you are. Vice versa, some of the contents typically found in a military first aid kit don’t apply to the threats you face, or the gear requires specific training.
Although a scrape that makes your five year old scream their head off in public might feel like an emergency, you’ll want a “boo boo kit” for that and not a serious trauma kit list like this one.
People who take preparedness seriously typically learn how to make a first aid kit rather than buy the cheap pre-made ones promoted on Amazon. Off-the-shelf kits are usually junky, built for different contexts like the military or backpacking, come with stuff you don’t need, and/or require you to toss out and upgrade so many of the included items that you’re better off starting from scratch.
Note: Doing this properly is not cheap. Expect to spend over $100 for a complete survival medical kit, less for an EDC first aid kit. But you can work your way through as budget allows — it’s better to buy one correct item at a time than to waste $40 on a junk kit.
We split emergency preparedness medical supplies into two buckets:
- Portable kits you can carry with you, such as a pouch in your emergency go-bags or something you carry in your daily purse or work bag
- Supplies you keep stored at home for a wider range of issues
This list is for the portable kits. It covers the range of EDC, IFAK, and Bug Out Bag medical kits because the prioritized list of contents is roughly the same for each — it just comes down to how much you can carry and thus how far down the list you can go.
More: 145 prioritized medical supplies for your home
Working through a single prioritized list has multiple benefits:
- You can stop however far down the list makes sense for your kit — if you’re building a small EDC first aid kit for your belt or purse, for example, get as far as you can within your space and weight limits.
- You can intelligently customize or change things to suit your needs — you might need certain medications or know that you’re prone to blisters, so you can customize the list without wildly guessing what to trade away.
- If you’re on a budget or starting from scratch, you’ll at least buy the most important stuff first.
See below the fold for more details and how to split this list into tiers based on your needs.
Prioritized first aid kit list:
- Tourniquet
- Pressure dressing
- Z-fold gauze, standard 4.5” x 4 yards
- Coban roll, standard 2” x 5 yards
- Trauma shears
- Acetaminophen / Tylenol
- Ibuprofen / Advil
- Diphenhydramine / Benadryl
- Loperamide / Imodium
- Band-aids (10x, various sizes)
- Chest seals (1 pair)
- Tweezers
- Irrigation syringe, 20cc with an 18 gauge tip
- White petroleum jelly / Vaseline in small container
- Silk medical tape roll, 1” wide
- Needle & thread stored in isopropyl alcohol (2x needle/thread, 1x small container)
- Moleskin, 5” x 2” strip
- Rolled gauze, standard 4.5” x 4 yards
- Gauze pads, 4” x 4” (6x)
- Plastic cling wrap, 2” wide roll
- Cravat / triangular bandage, 45” x 45” x 63”
- Butterfly bandages, 0.5″ x 2.75″ (16x)
- Safety pins (3x, various sizes)
- Elastic wrap / ACE bandage, standard 4” x 5 yards
- Aluminum splint, 36”
- Emergency blanket (2x)
- Gloves (2 pairs)
- Reference guide
- Saline eye drops
- Abdominal pad (sometimes “ab pad”), 5” x 9” (2x)
- Nasopharyngeal airway, 28 French (a unit of size used for these devices)
- Aspirin / Bayer
- Pepto-Bismol pills
- Caffeine pills
- Hydrocortisone cream
- Miconazole
- Doxycycline and/or Bactrim antibiotics