How Long You Have to Claim Flight Compensation

The EU261 regulation doesn't set a claim deadline; each country's national law does, through whatever general limitation period applies to a consumer contract claim there. Commonly cited figures range from 1 year (Poland, Belgium) to 6 years (UK, Ireland) to 10 years (Switzerland, Luxembourg) — always confirm the current figure before assuming you've run out of time.

What does this mean for you? Work out your own number: Flight delay compensation calculator

Regulation (EC) No 261/2004 is silent on how long you have to bring a claim. The Court of Justice of the EU settled, in Cuadrench Moré v KLM (C-139/11), that this is left entirely to each member state’s own national law — specifically, whatever limitation period that country applies to an ordinary claim of this kind (usually treated as a contract claim). That’s why the deadline for the same delayed flight can be one year in one country and ten in another.

Commonly cited limitation periods

These are general civil-law limitation periods reported by specialist claims services, not figures from a single EU source — unlike the compensation amounts themselves, there’s no EUR-Lex regulation to check them against, and a specific case can turn on which country’s courts actually have jurisdiction. Treat this as a starting point, not a verified deadline for your own claim.

Time limit	Countries
1 year	Poland, Belgium, Canada
2 years	Italy (international flights; 1 year for domestic), Netherlands, Malta, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia
3 years	Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Portugal, Romania, Czech Republic (with a 6-month airline-notification rule), Norway
4 years	Iceland
5 years	France, Spain, Greece, Hungary (2 years specifically against Wizz Air), Scotland
6 years	UK (England, Wales, Northern Ireland), Ireland, Cyprus
10 years	Switzerland, Luxembourg

Sweden is a partial exception: the general limitation period runs longer, but airlines there generally expect to be notified of a claim within about 2 months of the flight.

Which country’s deadline actually applies to you

This is the part that’s genuinely unsettled and fact-specific, not something a table can resolve:

• It’s usually the country where you’d bring the claim — often where you live, where the airline is based, or where the disruption happened — under EU rules on jurisdiction for consumer contracts.
• An airline may argue for whichever country’s limitation period is shortest; a passenger generally wants whichever is longest and legitimately available to them.
• Some airlines’ own conditions of carriage try to impose the 2-year deadline from the Montreal Convention (which governs baggage and injury claims, not EU261 compensation) — courts have generally rejected this for EU261 specifically, but it still gets cited.

The practical takeaway

If your flight was disrupted within the last year, the country-specific deadline almost never matters yet — file the claim with the airline directly, in writing, as soon as you can. If you want the amount to put in that claim, the flight compensation calculator works it out from your route and fills in a complaint letter you can download and send. If it’s been several years, the question of which country’s limitation period applies and whether it’s already run out is worth a specific answer from a national enforcement body or a consumer-rights organisation in the relevant country, not a general table like this one.