Two passengers on the same delayed transatlantic route, in the same three-hour hole, can walk away owed 600 euros or owed nothing. The difference is not their nationality, their airline's loyalty tier, or which website sold the ticket. It is the airport they took off from and the flag on the operating carrier, the metal in aviation slang, the actual aircraft flying you rather than the brand on your booking. That is the one rule worth memorizing before you ever fill in a claim form: compensation follows the route and the metal, not you.
So before you rage-tweet the airline, check the two things that decide your case: which airport you left, and whose plane you were on. Everything else, including your righteous anger, is legally irrelevant. Here is the map.
Leave an EU airport and any airline owes you, on the way in only some do
Under EU261, the regulation in force since 2004, a flight that leaves an airport in the European Union is covered whoever is flying you. A United States carrier out of Frankfurt is on the hook exactly like Lufthansa. Fly the other way, into the EU, and you are covered only if the operating airline is European. So the direction of the trip decides the payout. Same seat, same delay, and one leg pays while the other shrugs.
The math is flat and set by distance. A delay of three hours or more at arrival, measured when the doors open rather than when you push back, pays 250 euros for flights up to 1,500 kilometers, 400 euros between 1,500 and 3,500, and 600 euros beyond that. It is per passenger, so a family of four clears real money. The one asterisk is the long-haul top tier, and it only bites if they move you. On routes over 3,500 kilometers, if the airline puts you on a later flight that still gets you in within four hours of your original arrival, it may halve the 600 to 300. A pure delay sitting on your original aircraft pays the full 600 at three hours regardless of distance, so only in that rerouting case does a transatlantic delay effectively need four hours for the maximum. Enforcement is not uniform, though, and some carriers apply the 50 percent cut to straight long-haul delays too, so you may be offered 300 and have to push for the full 600.
Britain kept the same machine and swapped the currency
After Brexit the United Kingdom retained the identical rules as UK261 and simply changed the sign on the money. The UK Civil Aviation Authority sets the amounts at 220 pounds under 1,500 kilometers, 350 pounds between 1,500 and 3,500, and 520 pounds beyond, with the same three-hour trigger and the same long-haul halving to 260 pounds in the three-to-four-hour window. Any flight leaving a UK airport is covered on any airline; arrivals into the UK are covered when the operating carrier is British or European. The amounts do not move with your ticket price or your cabin, and the claim window runs to six years in England and Wales, which is longer than most people's memory of the flight.
Touch a Brazilian airport and the rules follow you, but the cash comes from a courtroom
This is the one people describe wrong, and I want to correct the version you will read elsewhere. Brazil's ANAC Resolution 400 covers any flight that touches a Brazilian airport, arriving or departing, regardless of your passport or the airline's home country, and that broad reach is the widest net of the four regimes here. But at four hours late it does not hand you a fixed cash tier. What it guarantees is a choice, rebooking, a full refund, or alternative transport with a bus included, plus escalating care: contact after one hour, a meal after two, a hotel and transfers after four. The fixed cash figure people quote, denominated in special drawing rights (the IMF currency basket the Montreal Convention uses for aviation liability), is for denied boarding, not delay.
Cash for a Brazilian delay comes from the consumer code, not the aviation rule. You claim material damages against your receipts and moral damages for the wasted time, and a judge sets the moral figure in reais, not dollars. Recent rulings commonly land between about 3,000 and 15,000 reais for a delay past four hours, roughly 500 to 2,500 euros at about six reais to the euro, with the higher end reserved for overnight strandings left without help. The claims platform Resolvvi reported a 2026 average near 5,300 reais. Brazilians file these through small-claims courts that do not make you prove a set tariff, which is why the regime has a reputation for actually paying out. One caveat has surfaced lately, though it is not yet settled law: in January 2026 the Superior Tribunal de Justiça ruled that a delay by itself no longer presumes moral harm, so you may now have to show the trip was genuinely wrecked, not merely annoying. That was a single panel's decision, and the broader constitutional question sits unresolved at the Supreme Federal Tribunal, so lower courts are not yet bound by it.
In the United States there is no compensation, only your own money back
The United States has no delay-compensation regime at all. None. An American carrier can strand you overnight domestically and owe you exactly zero on top of your fare. The only backstop is the Department of Transportation's 2024 rule, whose automatic-refund requirement took effect that October, which forces an automatic cash refund when a flight is canceled or significantly changed and you decline the alternative. Significant means three hours domestic, six hours international, plus airport swaps, added connections, and downgrades. Read the verb carefully: that is a refund, your own money back for a trip you no longer take, not compensation for the trip going wrong. If you fly anyway, you get nothing.
The EU reform landed this month, but not much changes yet
The overhaul everyone is asking about has cleared both institutions. On July 7, 2026, the European Parliament backed the conciliation deal by 646 votes to 12, and the Council gave final clearance on July 13, the first rewrite of these rules since 2004. It is adopted, but it is not yet law you can invoke: it enters force twenty days after it is published in the Official Journal, and airlines then get a year to prepare, so most of it applies around 2027. Until then, the 250-400-600 numbers above are the ones that pay.
According to Parliament's own summary, the headline win is defensive. The three-hour trigger survived, after the Council spent years pushing to stretch it to four or six, and the compensation amounts are kept at 250, 400, and 600 euros rather than changed. The package also secures a seat for children under 14 next to a parent at no extra charge and requires an airline invoking extraordinary circumstances to justify it, with the burden of proof staying on the carrier. A widely reported measure showing fares with a cabin-bag allowance by default is part of the same text, though the exact carry-on wording is still being read different ways across outlets, so treat that one as directional until the published text settles it. The claim process also comes out better than the pre-vote gloom suggested. Airlines must give you clear instructions on how to file for compensation within four days of the journey ending, and then have 30 days either to pay or to explain why not. What got trimmed was the fuller version some members of Parliament wanted, a pre-filled form rather than just the instructions, so you still complete the claim yourself, but they can no longer pretend you were never told how.
Before you file
None of this is automatic and none of it is generous. Every regime lets the airline off the hook for extraordinary circumstances outside its control, real weather, air-traffic-control strikes, security, which is the escape hatch they reach for first and sometimes wrongly. No airline pays until you make it. The one piece of good news buried in all of this is that you have months to years to do so, not days. So work out which airport you left and whose plane you were on, that tells you which rulebook you are holding, and then go file. The deadline is friendlier than the gate agent was.
