Flight delay compensation in the UK: the plain guide

If your flight landed three hours or more late, you may be owed a fixed sum of money. Not a voucher, not a refund of your ticket: compensation, set by law, that the airline has to pay whether your ticket cost £19 or £900.

This guide covers the rules as they apply to flights from the UK and the EU, what you can get, and the excuses airlines use.

Who qualifies

You can claim if all of these are true:

• Your flight departed from a UK or EU airport, on any airline; or it arrived in the UK or EU on a UK or EU airline.
• You arrived at your final destination three hours or more late, or your flight was cancelled less than 14 days before departure, or you were denied boarding because the flight was overbooked.
• The delay was the airline's responsibility: a technical fault, a crew problem, an operational decision. Not a genuine storm, not a security incident, not a strike by air traffic controllers.

It is the delay at arrival that counts, measured when the aircraft doors open. A flight that leaves four hours late and makes up time to land two hours and fifty minutes late does not qualify. One that leaves on time and diverts to land three hours late does.

How much

The amount depends on distance, not on what you paid.

For flights over 3,500 km delayed between three and four hours, the airline may pay half. Each passenger on the booking, including children with their own seat, gets the full amount.

How long you have

• England, Wales and Northern Ireland: six years from the flight.
• Scotland: five years.
• EU countries: it varies. Germany gives three years; Spain five; France five; Italy two; Belgium and Poland one. If your flight left from an EU airport, the time limit of that country usually applies.

Airlines rely on people assuming it's too late. It usually isn't.

The excuses

Airlines refuse a large share of valid claims the first time. The refusals cluster around a few phrases.

"Extraordinary circumstances." The legal exception. It covers things genuinely outside the airline's control: severe weather at the airport, air traffic control restrictions, security incidents, political instability. It does not cover technical faults with the aircraft (the Court of Appeal settled that in Huzar v Jet2.com in 2014), crew sickness, crew running out of hours, or the aircraft arriving late from a previous flight. If the refusal says "technical issue" or "operational reasons", it is wrong in law.

"The delay was under three hours." Check your arrival time against the scheduled arrival time, at the gate. Airlines sometimes quote the runway time, which is earlier.

"You accepted a voucher." A voucher offered at the airport is not compensation unless you signed something agreeing it was. Most people didn't.

"You need to claim within [short period]." There is no such rule; see the time limits above.

Claiming yourself, or using us

You can always claim directly from the airline for free, and for a clear-cut case with a cooperative airline it can work. The reason people use a claims service is the second letter: the one after the refusal, that cites the case law and sets a deadline, and the referral to the dispute scheme when that deadline passes. That is what we do, on a no-win-no-fee basis. Our fee is a flat 30% of what we recover, including VAT, with no extra charge if the claim goes to a dispute scheme or court.