We present the design and vacuum performance of a compact room-temperature trapped ion system for quantum computing, consisting of an ultra-high vacuum (UHV) package, a micro-fabricated surface trap, and a small form-factor ion pump. The system is designed to maximize mechanical stability and robustness by minimizing the system size and weight. The internal volume of the UHV package is only ≈ 2 cm 3, a significant reduction in comparison with conventional vacuum chambers used in trapped ion experiments. We demonstrate trapping of 174Yb+ ions in this system and characterize the vacuum level in the UHV package by monitoring both the rates of ion hopping in a double-well potential and ion chain reordering events. The calculated pressure in this vacuum package is ≈ 2.2 × 10 11 Torr, which is sufficient for the majority of current trapped ion experiments.