Learn about your legal rights and EU Regulation 261 with our in depth guides below.
Written by our legal team, they are regularly updated to reflect changes in law, and provide comprehensive legal advice to help you understand your legal rights when you’ve experienced a flight delay or cancellation.
Find out more about flight delay compensation, read our FAQs, or get an instant decision on your flight.
EU261 provides legal rights for airline passengers to claim compensation up to £520 if their flight is delayed or cancelled or if they were denied boarding and it was not the responsibility of the airline.
Under EU Regulation 261, you’ll be eligible to claim compensation if your flight is delayed three hours or more than the originally scheduled arrival time, and the delay is the airline’s responsibility and not an extraordinary circumstance. The legal definition of arrival time is when the first aircraft door has been opened.
You may be able to claim a full refund for your airline ticket and compensation if your flight was cancelled less than 14 days before the departure date and the airline could not provide you with an alternative flight that arrived within 2 hours of the originally scheduled arrival time.
Under EU Regulation 261, airlines are legally obliged to compensate passengers who are bumped from a flight due to overbooking. If you were not allowed to board your flight because of overbooking, you can claim compensation up to £520 or get a full refund.
EU Regulation 261 and your rights to claim compensation applies to all types of flight delays, including if your flight was diverted to another airport and you arrived at your original destination more than three hours later than originally scheduled.
If you have been denied boarding your flight through no fault of your own, you may be entitled to flight compensation of up to £520. To claim compensation, you must show that you were a responsible passenger and have not given the airline any reason not to allow you to board the plane.
If you have arrived at your final destination more than three hours later than scheduled because of a missed connection, you may be able to claim flight compensation if the delay was not due to an extraordinary circumstance. The airline is responsible for booking you on the next available flight and providing care and assistance.
If your flight has been cancelled by the airline then you may be able to claim flight cancellation compensation of up to £520, depending on the circumstances and how much notice the airline gave you of the cancellation.
How much you can claim for a flight delay will depend on the length of your delay and the flight distance. The maximum amount of compensation you can claim for a delayed flight is £520 per passenger. The amount of compensation increases the longer you are delayed and the further the distance of your flight.
Under EU Regulation 261, airline passengers have the right to claim compensation only if the airline’s employees are on strike and the strike has caused a delay of at least 3 hours or a flight cancellation.
EU Regulation 261 provides airline passengers the right to claim compensation for flight delays and cancellations caused by bad weather if the weather is not considered “freak” or “wholly exceptional” or if the weather conditions have not forced air traffic control to limit the number of flights.
Extraordinary circumstances are defined in EU Regulation 261/2004 – the law surrounding delayed flights, denied boarding, downgrading and flight cancellations.
As recently as July 2024, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of passengers, determining that crew sickness is not an extraordinary circumstance and that delays and cancellations caused by it are claimable.
If your flight has been cancelled or delayed because of a technical issue on the plane, you are able to claim compensation under EU Regulation 261. EU Reg 261 classifies technical issues or technical faults on an aircraft as the airline’s responsibility, and managing such issues is inherent in the running of an airline.
When calculating the length of a flight delay under EU regulation 261, the arrival time is when at least one of the plane doors is opened. Arrival time is not when the aircraft lands on the runway, comes to a standstill, or even arrives at the gate. It is only calculated by when one of the plane’s doors is opened.
As part of their legal requirements under EUReg 261, UK based airlines are legally bound to pay compensation for delays or cancellations that are not classed as an extraordinary circumstance.
Article 9 of EU Reg 261 states that airlines must provide passengers with a level of “care and assistance” if their flight is delayed beyond a certain number of hours, regardless of whether the delay or cancellation is the airline’s responsibility or not.
When it comes to claiming flight compensation, some prefer the “do it yourself” approach. Representing yourself in court, or acting as a ‘litigant in person’ to give it its official title, is certainly an option when it comes to making a flight delay claim; but is not without its potential pitfalls.
In the UK, you can claim compensation for eligible flights that departed in the last six years. Airlines often argued that The Montreal Convention 1999 meant passengers had just two years to start your claim.
Bott and Co’s flight delay compensation lawyers are shaping the very laws on which consumers rely. We played a central role in the landmark Huzar V Jet2 case.
We’re the law firm that took the case of Dawson v Thomson Airways all the way to the Supreme Court and won – unlocking nearly £4billion in flight delay compensation for millions of passengers.
An ECJ ruling in the case of van der Lans v KLM has today confirmed that airlines are required to pay compensation when flights are delayed due to unforeseen technical problems.