Download the form
DD Form 1796 is a Department of Defense form, not a service form: DD Form 1796, Receipt for Unaccompanied Baggage, September 1998, used to Receipt for Unaccompanied Baggage. The DD prefix is the operative fact. It means one blank serves every military department — Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Space Force, Coast Guard under Defense jurisdiction — plus the defense agencies and combatant commands. No branch variant exists.
Authority: not stated prescribes it, not stated maintains it. Those two names settle most disputes about why the form is being asked for. Local commands add timing on top; the requirement itself comes from above them.
Use not stated, status not stated. Older printings circulate widely and lose their currency Department-wide the moment a new edition issues.
Available: PDF, across 1 pages, roughly 21 fields. That is the whole scope of the download decision.
Default to fillable pdf, print only when you must. The fillable file stores what you type; the printable file is a blank picture. A Department form often travels further than a service form — scanned, emailed, forwarded to an agency that never saw the original — and typed text is what survives that.
Xfdl is a legacy Department format, IBM Lotus Forms, requiring the matching viewer. Its survival in DD distribution reflects how widely it was fielded across the Department, not any advantage over pdf today.
All formats are free. One operational note: save the file locally and open it in a desktop reader. Browser-embedded viewers drop field properties and lose typed data without warning.
What the form asks for
- Press this Reset button to clear the data from all fields.
- 1. Delivered to.
- 3. Receipt of the following articles is acknowledged. a. Number of boxes.
- b. Number of Duffel bags/Sea bags.
- c. Number of suitcases.
- d. Number of cartons.
- e. Number of foot lockers.
- f. Number of trunks.
- g. Number of tool boxes.
- h. Other (describe).
- h. Number of other pieces.
- 4. Name and Address of Responsible I T O at Destination.
- 2. Received from. a. Name (last, first, middle initial).
- b. Rank.
- c. Branch of service.
- d. Social security number (do not include dashes).
- 5. Received by. a. Name (last, first, middle initial).
- b. Rank.
- 6. Date (4 digit year, 2 digit month, 2 digit day).
- 7. Activity Address.
Edition check comes first, ahead of any entry. Compare the printed date to not stated and replace anything older. Department-level supersession is simultaneous across the services, so a superseded blank is not merely out of date locally; the office receiving it is already working from the new field structure whichever branch it belongs to.
Unclear entries — read the form face, then not stated; the directive prevails.
Submit to the office named in not stated or in local instruction; retain a duplicate before it leaves. Joint routing often sends a DD form across organizational boundaries, and tracing one afterward is not a same-day matter.
Related forms are found by number alone. The DD sequence is one unified Department-wide series, so a cited number resolves to exactly one document with no branch qualifier needed.
Where a procedure cites both a service form and a DD form, the two are unconnected. Service numbering answers to a service proponent, DD numbering to not stated or another Department office, and the two sequences were never aligned. Matching numbers mean nothing whatever.
Three drivers of revision: directive reissue, altered collection requirements, updated statutory notice text. No notification accompanies any of them, so download fresh and confirm not stated rather than reusing an archived file.
Limits of this page: it distributes a published Department of Defense document and describes it. No legal advice, no procedural ruling, no statement about whether any submission will be accepted. Applicability, eligibility and procedure belong to not stated, to a servicing personnel office, or to the office named in not stated.
Questions and answers
- What is DD Form 1796?
- DD Form 1796, Receipt for Unaccompanied Baggage, September 1998
- Which edition is current?
- Not stated by the publisher
- Who is responsible for this form?
- Not stated
- In which formats can it be downloaded?