EU 261/2004 delay payout and filing deadline

A German business traveller with two seats booked and a 3 h 30 arrival delay over 3,800 km is owed €1,200 under Regulation 261/2004 — and that claim dies on 31 December 2029.

Both halves of that sentence are the problem. The amount is fixed by distance, so it is easy to get wrong in the direction the airline prefers. The deadline is not in the Regulation at all.

The amount is a table, not a negotiation

Article 7 pays €250 up to 1,500 km, €400 from 1,500 to 3,500 km, €400 for any intra-EU flight over 1,500 km however far it goes, and €600 over 3,500 km when one airport sits outside the EU. Compensation is owed once the arrival delay at the final destination reaches three hours.

Article 7(2) is where hand calculations collapse. The airline may halve the amount, but only if you accepted re-routing and your arrival delay stayed under 2 h in Band A, 3 h in Band B or 4 h in Band C. Type a 6,500 km flight, 3 h 30 late, two passengers, re-routing accepted, and the tool returns €300 each and €600 for the booking — halved, correctly. Change nothing but the delay, push it past four hours, and the same booking is €1,200. A chatbot asked to check will cheerfully apply the 3 h threshold to a Band C flight.

The deadline is national law, and it is not one number

Regulation 261/2004 sets no limitation period. What you actually have is the general limitation rule of the country whose courts would hear the claim, and across the EU and the UK that runs from one year to ten. Poland gives one year. Italy and the Netherlands give two. Germany gives three, counted not from the flight but to 31 December of the third year. Portugal three, Spain and France five, Ireland and the United Kingdom six, Luxembourg ten.

This is the question free tools answer worst, because they answer it at all: ask how long you have to claim and you get one confident figure, usually the two or three years that appears most often in training text. Pick that on a Polish claim and you are eleven months late.

So the extension does not print a window. It prints a date. A flight on 30 August 2026 with the claim in Poland: file by 30 August 2027. The same flight, claim in Germany: 31 December 2029. Four passengers on a 2,200 km intra-EU flight 3 h 12 late on 19 December 2025, claim in Luxembourg: €400 each, €1,600 for the booking, file by 19 December 2035.

What the commission costs

The no-win-no-fee route is real, and expensive. AirHelp keeps 35% of whatever it recovers, and 50% once a case goes to court. Flightright quotes 20–30% plus VAT. On the two-passenger Band C booking above, 35% is €420; you receive €780. The commission is an input in the popup rather than a constant, so you can put the exact percentage you were quoted next to the number that would reach your own account.

Free, and where the key sits

Every figure — band, per-passenger amount, booking total, agency cut, net, deadline date, days left and the sentence explaining which rule produced the amount — is free, for any number of flights, with no watermark and no lock on the answer. The same tool.js runs in the popup and on the free web page.

The $60 key changes axis rather than volume. It adds keeping: a .csv claim record with every figure, ready to attach to the airline complaint or the small-claims filing. And it adds repeating: browser alarms 30 days, 14 days and one day before the filing date you were given. One key per person or team seat.

Nothing typed into the popup leaves the browser; the only outbound call is the licence check when you press export or set an alarm.