The three-hour rule survived. Arrive more than three hours late and EU261 still owes you 250 to 600 euros, set by distance rather than by the ticket price. EU261 is Europe's air passenger rights regulation, formally Regulation (EC) 261/2004, and Parliament confirmed its reform on 7 July 2026 by 646 votes to 12 with three abstentions, the Council on 13 July. The new text applies twelve months and twenty days after publication in the Official Journal, so today's rules govern every flight for at least another year.
What you are owed, and when
| Journey | Compensation |
|---|---|
| Up to 1,500 km | 250 euros |
| Intra-EU over 1,500 km, and other routes 1,500 to 3,500 km | 400 euros |
| Everything longer | 600 euros |
The trigger is a delay of more than three hours at arrival, a cancellation less than 14 days out, or denied boarding, which is the airline refusing to let you on a flight you hold a confirmed seat on. The Council had pushed for four or six hours, which would have ended most claims on European flying. On the longest routes an airline may still pay half if it reroutes you or gets you there within four hours of the original time.
Four changes that affect your ticket
- No-show rules are gone. A no-show rule voids the rest of a ticket when you skip one segment, and it was standard practice. You may now fly the return half of a two-way ticket without having flown the outbound, at no extra charge.
- Self-rerouting, at the airline's expense. After a cancellation or denied boarding the airline has three hours to offer you a route to your destination. If it does not, you book your own and claim up to 400 per cent of the ticket price.
- Nine months to claim, 30 days to answer. The airline must pay or invoke extraordinary circumstances inside a month, and must tell you how to claim within four days of the journey ending, without an account or an app.
- Hand luggage is in the headline price. Fares must include carry-on baggage from the start of booking, and one personal item is free. Anyone accompanying a child under 14 gets an adjacent seat at no cost.
Two tickets are still two contracts
Compensation and rerouting attach to one contract of carriage, and that rule came through untouched. Folkerts (C-11/11) measures how late you reach your final destination rather than how late the first flight was. Buy two separate tickets and the second airline owes you nothing when the first runs late.
On a self-transfer, where you make the connection yourself between two unrelated bookings and no airline is responsible for it, the protection is the one you build: a long enough gap, a flexible onward ticket, or insurance that names missed connections. The arithmetic is in two tickets, one trip.
Keep boarding passes and delay notices from now on. Nine months is shorter than the limitation period several member states currently allow.