Delayed, damaged or lost baggage: how compensation works

Regulation (EC) No 261/2004 establishes minimum rights in the event of denied boarding, cancellation and delay. Checked baggage is not governed there. Liability for baggage follows the Montreal Convention instead, which the European Community concluded through Council Decision 2001/539/EC and which is implemented in EU law by Regulation (EC) No 2027/97 as amended by Regulation (EC) No 889/2002. Under Article 3(1) of that Regulation, the liability of an EU air carrier for passengers and their baggage is governed by the Convention's provisions, and the amended Article 1 extends them to carriage by air within a single Member State, so purely domestic flights with an EU airline are covered too. Otherwise, the Convention applies to international journeys between States that are parties to it (Article 1(2)). If you fly with a non-EU airline to or from a country that is not a party, different rules may apply.

Article 17(2) of the Convention makes the carrier liable where checked baggage is destroyed or lost, or is damaged, provided that the event which caused it took place on board the aircraft or during any period within which the baggage was in the charge of the carrier. Where the damage resulted from the inherent defect, quality or vice of the baggage, the carrier is not liable for it, and for unchecked baggage the carrier is liable only if the damage resulted from its own fault or that of its servants or agents. For delay, Article 19 applies: the carrier is liable for damage occasioned by delay, but escapes liability if it proves that it took all measures that could reasonably be required, or that it was impossible to take such measures.

The two tracks can run in parallel. If the flight itself was cancelled or heavily delayed, that question is assessed separately under 261/2004, whose Article 12 expressly leaves the right to further compensation untouched while allowing compensation granted under the Regulation to be deducted from such compensation.

Article 22(2) limits the carrier's liability for destroyed, lost, damaged or delayed baggage to an amount for each individual passenger. The original text of the Convention states 1,000 Special Drawing Rights, but Article 24 contains a mechanism for the periodic review of the limits, and following ICAO's most recent revision 1,519 SDR has applied since 28 December 2024. The SDR, or Special Drawing Right, is a unit of account, so the amount in Swedish kronor varies with the exchange rate. The Swedish Consumer Agency puts it at roughly SEK 21,800, but at the IMF rate on 5 October 2026, 1,519 SDR was worth roughly SEK 20,600.

Two judgments of the Court of Justice of the EU refine the limit. In Case C‑63/09, Walz v Clickair, the Court held that the term 'damage' which underpins Article 22(2) must be interpreted as including both material and non-material damage. The ceiling therefore applies to everything you claim, and not to each head of damage separately. In Case C‑410/11, Espada Sánchez and Others v Iberia, the Court held that the right to compensation and the limits to the carrier's liability apply also where a passenger claims compensation for baggage checked in in another passenger's name, provided that that lost baggage did in fact contain the claiming passenger's items. For a family who have split their belongings between shared suitcases, that can matter a great deal.

The ceiling is a limit, not a flat rate. You need to be able to show what loss you have suffered, and the Swedish Consumer Agency points to receipts, tickets or boarding passes and photographs as supporting material. The route to a higher ceiling set out in Article 22(2) is that you made a so-called special declaration of the bag's value at the time when the checked baggage was handed over to the carrier, in practice at check-in, and paid a supplementary sum if the case so required. Nor does the limit apply if it is proved that the carrier, its servants or agents caused the damage with intent to cause damage or recklessly and with knowledge that damage would probably result (Article 22(5)), which is a demanding test. A carrier may also have committed itself to higher limits or to no limits at all (Article 25).