Delayed, cancelled or bumped off a flight touching the EU? You may be owed up to €600 per passenger — in cash, not vouchers. Answer four questions to see where you stand.
Regulation (EC) No 261/2004 sets a fixed cash sum per passenger, based only on flight distance — not on your ticket price. A €40 budget seat and a €4,000 business fare are owed exactly the same. The amounts have not moved since 2004, and the June 2026 reform deliberately left them alone.
| Flight distance | Compensation | Delay trigger |
|---|---|---|
| Up to 1,500 km | €250 | 3+ hours late at arrival |
| 1,500–3,500 km | €400 | 3+ hours late at arrival |
| Over 3,500 km | €600 | 3+ hours (€300 if re-routed and 3–4 hours late) |
The compensation is separate from your right to a refund or re-routing, and separate from your right to care — meals, phone calls and a hotel if you are stranded overnight. You can claim all of them.
You are covered when the flight departed from an EU or EEA airport (on any airline in the world), or arrived at an EU/EEA airport on an EU/EEA carrier. The disruption has to be the airline's responsibility: a technical fault, crew shortage, overbooking or the airline's own staff strike all qualify. Truly external events — a storm that closes the runway, an air-traffic-control restriction, a security incident — do not, because the airline could not have prevented them. Most passengers who assume "it was weather, so no claim" are wrong: the airline has to prove the extraordinary circumstance, and courts read the exemption narrowly.
Time limits depend on the country where you file, and range from roughly two years (e.g. Poland, the Netherlands) to six (the UK, Ireland) — so a delayed flight from a couple of years ago is very often still claimable.
If you want the whole process laid out — the letter to send, the deadlines by country, the annotated regulation — it lives on our step-by-step claims site, eu261rights.com. If they refuse or ignore you — which the June 2026 reform did nothing to prevent, since it dropped the proposed automatic-payment rule — the practical options are a national enforcement body, a small-claims court, or a no-win-no-fee claims service that handles the fight for a percentage of the payout. A service makes sense when the airline is stonewalling, the claim crosses borders, or you simply do not want to spend months on it; doing it yourself makes sense when the airline has already accepted fault and just needs a nudge.
No. The political agreement reached on 15 June 2026 kept the €250–€600 bands and the three-hour delay trigger exactly as they were. The changes it did introduce — a guaranteed second cabin bag and faster mandatory rerouting — only take effect in the second half of 2027, and they add to your rights rather than reduce them.
No. EU261 pays a fixed sum based on distance alone. Economy and business passengers on the same delayed flight are owed the identical amount.
Not necessarily. "Extraordinary circumstances" is a legal test the airline must prove, and it is read narrowly. Knock-on delays from an earlier disruption, routine technical faults and crew shortages do not qualify, even when the airline describes them as beyond its control.
It depends on the country you file in — from about two years to six. In practice, delays going back two to three years are very often still within the window, so an old boarding pass can still be worth money.
The UK kept the same rules after Brexit as "UK261", with near-identical sums set in pounds (£220 / £350 / £520). A London–New York delay is handled under UK law rather than EU law, but the logic is the same.
It depends. If the airline has already admitted fault, claim yourself and keep 100%. If they are ignoring you, the claim is cross-border, or you would rather not spend months chasing it, a no-win-no-fee service does the work and only takes a share if it wins.
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Guidance only, not legal advice; eligibility turns on the facts of your flight. Compensation figures reflect Regulation (EC) No 261/2004 and the June 2026 reform agreement, current at July 2026. Uncompromised Travel may earn a commission from claim services linked here at no cost to you.
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