70 × 37 mm labels

A grid with no margins at all

70 × 37 mm is what you get when you divide an A4 page into a 3 × 8 grid and keep the arithmetic exact. Three columns of 70 mm is 210 mm, the full width of the sheet. Eight rows of 37 mm is 296 mm, which leaves half a millimetre at the top and half at the bottom of A4's 297 mm.

That makes it a butt-cut sheet: the labels touch, with no waste matrix between them. It is the most efficient use of a page any 24-up layout can manage, and it is why this is the standard 24-up in countries that never used inch-based stock.

What this size is

In inches

2.76 × 1.46 in. Designed in millimetres, so the inch figures here are the conversion rather than the origin.

Vessels it wraps

Anything from a 50 mL conical tube upwards, so also a GL45 reagent bottle. The tightest of those has a usable band of about 88 × 55 mm, which this label fits inside.

Die-cut sheets

A4 · 24-up · 70 × 37 mm — 24 per A4 sheet.

Roll stock that carries it

76.2 mm, 101.6 mm. The narrowest that takes it is 76.2 mm, and a roll narrower than the label is reported as an error rather than trimmed.

What fits on a 70 × 37 mm label

Telling the two 24-up sheets apart

Put a ruler across the top row. If the labels touch, it is the 70 × 37 mm grid. If there is a visible 2.5 mm channel of backing between the columns, it is 63.5 × 33.9 mm. The difference is obvious once you look for it and invisible on the box, where both are sold as “24 labels per sheet”.

The consequence of getting it wrong is not subtle. Printing a 63.5 mm layout onto a 70 mm sheet puts the first column roughly right and every column after it progressively further left, so by the third column the text is printing across the die cut.

Butt-cut sheets have one practical drawback worth knowing about: with no waste matrix, there is nothing to peel away, so labels have to be lifted individually from the backing. That is fine for a handful and tedious for a page.