A GRE-encapsulated packet consists of the original passenger packet wrapped inside a GRE header and a new outer IP delivery header, and the combined size of these two additions is what constitutes GRE's per-packet overhead. The base GRE header, as defined in RFC 2784 and used in its minimal, non-keyed, non-checksummed form (the default and most common deployment), is exactly 4 bytes in length, containing the flags/version field and the protocol type field identifying the encapsulated payload's ether type. Layered around that GRE header is a completely new outer IPv4 header, which itself consumes a standard 20 bytes, containing the tunnel source and destination addresses used for delivery across the underlying network. Adding these two components together — 4 bytes for the GRE header plus 20 bytes for the new outer IPv4 header — yields a total of exactly 24 bytes of overhead imposed on every encapsulated packet, which is precisely why Junos automatically sets the default protocol MTU on gr- tunnel interfaces to 1476 bytes (1500 minus 24) to prevent oversized, post-encapsulation packets from requiring fragmentation on a standard 1500-byte Ethernet path. The 20-byte figure alone describes only the new IP header in isolation and omits the GRE header itself, while 12 and 32 bytes do not correspond to any standard, non-keyed GRE encapsulation configuration and are included purely as plausible-looking distractors. Reference topics: Junos Enterprise Routing – Tunneling, GRE Header Overhead and MTU Planning.