On this page 5
Every figure on this site comes from a regulator or the regulation itself, and the calculator runs the same rule modules that generate these pages, so a number on a page and a number in the calculator cannot drift apart.
Sources
- EU261: Regulation (EC) No 261/2004, with the thresholds as interpreted by the Court of Justice — long delays treated as cancellations, and arrival measured at the moment the aircraft doors open.
- UK261: the retained UK regulation, with the sterling amounts as published by the Civil Aviation Authority, including the lower tier for a three-to-four-hour arrival delay on flights over 3,500 km.
- Canada: the Air Passenger Protection Regulations (SOR/2019-150), with the large and small carrier bands and the separate denied-boarding scale.
- United States: 14 CFR Part 250 for oversales, with the current caps of $1,075 and $2,150, and the DOT refund rules.
- Airport coordinates: OurAirports, which releases its data into the public domain. We use 5,458 airports with IATA codes and scheduled service.
Distance
Compensation bands depend on the great-circle distance from your departure airport to your final destination, not leg by leg. We compute it with the haversine formula on those coordinates, which is accurate to well within a kilometre — irrelevant except for a route sitting within a few kilometres of the 1,500 or 3,500 km boundary, where you should expect the airline to measure it too.
Where we show a range rather than a number
Canada's APPR pays by airline size, defined as two million passengers in each of the two previous years. Three carriers sit near that line and can change category between years. For those we show both bands rather than publish a figure we cannot stand behind, and we say to claim the higher one.
What we deliberately do not do
We do not tell you whether your particular cause counts as extraordinary circumstances, because that turns on evidence only the airline holds. The calculator takes your answer at face value and tells you what follows from it.
We have also left the Crown Dependencies out of the UK regime rather than assert a position on Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man that we cannot source.
Corrections
If a figure here is wrong we would rather know. Law changes, and the EU261 reform agreed in June 2026 will change some of this once the adopted text is published — we are waiting for the Official Journal rather than updating from press summaries. Last reviewed 2026-10-25.
Check what your flight is worth
Four regimes checked at once, with the article the number comes from.