If your flight to, from, or within Europe arrived three or more hours late, was cancelled less than 14 days before departure, or you were denied boarding because the airline oversold it, you are very likely owed fixed cash compensation under Regulation (EC) 261/2004 - better known as EU261. Not a voucher, not a meal coupon: a bank transfer of €250, €400 or €600 per passenger, on top of your ticket.
This is the piece of passenger law most travellers half-know and rarely use. Airlines pay out on a fraction of eligible claims, largely because people never file. Here's the whole system in one place, including what the freshly agreed 2026 reform changes (and, more importantly, what it doesn't).
Who is covered
EU261 applies to:
- Any flight departing an EU/EEA airport, on any airline - including a US carrier flying you from Paris to New York.
- Any flight arriving into the EU/EEA on an EU/EEA airline - Madrid to Bogotá on Iberia counts; the same route on Avianca doesn't.
The UK kept a mirror-image version after Brexit (usually called UK261) with the same structure and sterling amounts of £220, £350 and £520. Our separate guide to flight delay and cancellation compensation for US and UK travellers covers that side, plus the much weaker US rules.
The three tiers: what you're owed
Compensation is set by flight distance, not by what you paid for the ticket:
| Flight distance | Compensation per passenger |
|---|---|
| Up to 1,500 km (e.g. London to Amsterdam) | €250 |
| 1,500-3,500 km, and all intra-EU flights over 1,500 km (e.g. Dublin to Athens) | €400 |
| Over 3,500 km (e.g. Frankfurt to Bangkok) | €600 |
Two things follow from that table. First, the cheapest tickets produce the most lopsided payouts: a €29 budget fare delayed four hours pays the same €250 as a €400 flexible fare on the same route. Second, distance is measured great-circle, final destination to origin - connections don't add up the segments.
One trim to know about: if the airline reroutes you and you still arrive reasonably close to schedule (within 2, 3 or 4 hours depending on distance), it may halve the compensation.
When you qualify
- Delays: you must arrive at your final destination 3+ hours late. Departure delay doesn't matter; arrival time does - measured when the doors open, not at touchdown.
- Cancellations: you're owed compensation if the airline told you less than 14 days before departure, unless the replacement flight it offered gets you there close to the original times.
- Denied boarding: if you're bumped off an oversold flight against your will, compensation is due immediately - no threshold, no excuses.
- Missed connections: on a single booking, a short first-leg delay that cascades into a 3+ hour late arrival at your final destination qualifies for the full amount based on the whole journey's distance. (On separately booked tickets you have no such protection - that's the trap we cover in who pays when a self-transfer goes wrong.)
The airline's escape hatch: "extraordinary circumstances"
Airlines don't owe compensation when the disruption was caused by something genuinely outside their control: severe weather, air traffic control restrictions, security incidents, political instability, or a strike by airport staff or ATC.
What does not count, thanks to years of court rulings: routine technical problems with the aircraft, crew scheduling failures, and in most cases strikes by the airline's own staff. "Operational reasons" is not a legal category. If the airline's rejection email cites a technical fault, that's usually a claim worth pushing, not dropping.
Note the scope of the escape hatch, too: extraordinary circumstances cancel the compensation, never the duty of care. Even in a blizzard, the airline still owes you meals, communication, and a hotel if you're stranded overnight.
What you're owed on top of the cash
Separate from compensation, EU261 obliges the airline to look after you during the disruption:
- Meals and refreshments after a 2-4 hour wait (threshold depends on distance).
- Hotel and transfers if you're rebooked to the next day.
- A choice between rerouting and a full refund if the delay passes 5 hours or the flight is cancelled - and if you take the refund on a cancelled flight, that's the ticket money back in addition to any compensation owed.
Keep receipts if the airline goes missing at the gate; reasonable self-paid expenses are recoverable.
What the 2026 reform actually changed
After more than a decade of lobbying to raise the delay threshold to 5 hours and cut the payout grid, the European Parliament and Council reached a political agreement in June 2026 - and the headline is what survived: the 3-hour threshold stays, and the €250/€400/€600 amounts stay.
The visible passenger win is baggage: airlines will have to include one piece of hand luggage plus a personal item in the base fare, ending the separate cabin-bag fee that budget carriers turned into a business line. The quiet passenger loss: earlier drafts required airlines to pre-fill claim forms or pay out automatically, and that was dropped. Claiming remains on you. Formal adoption is expected late 2026, with the new text applying from around 2027 - until then, everything in this article is the law as it stands.
How to claim (without paying a middleman)
- Gather the basics: booking reference, boarding passes, and the actual arrival time (screenshot a flight tracker if you can - airlines' own records sometimes disagree).
- Claim directly with the airline. Every EU carrier has an EU261 claim form buried on its website. State the flight, the delay length, cite Regulation (EC) 261/2004, and give your IBAN. Ten minutes.
- If they reject or stall, escalate for free to the national enforcement body of the country you departed from, or the relevant ADR/ombudsman scheme. Rejection-then-payout after escalation is extremely common.
- Mind the clock: time limits are national law - roughly 3 years in Germany, 5 in Spain and France, 6 in England - so old flights from the last couple of years may still be claimable.
Claim agencies will do all this for 25-50% of your payout. They make sense only if the airline has dug in and you don't want the hassle of small-claims court; as a first move, they're an expensive way to send an email.
The bigger picture: disruption is part of the price
A €600 payout is nice; not needing it is nicer. Delay risk is partly bookable-around: nonstop flights remove the misconnection lottery entirely, morning departures delay less than evening ones, and a single booking keeps the airline on the hook for the whole journey. And since compensation never depends on your fare, a genuinely cheap ticket on a covered route is doubly good value - you pay less and hold the same rights as the passenger who paid triple.
That first half - paying less - is the half Flyozo does. We watch fares from your home airports around the clock and alert you when a route drops to an unusually low price, so the flights you claim your rights on cost you as little as possible to begin with. The weekly digest is free; Premium (about $24/year) adds real-time alerts filtered to your airports.
