Delayed or Cancelled: What the Data Shows and What UK261 Pays

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Most advice about flight delays is written as though the delay is a random event that happened to you. It is closer to a property of the airport you chose. In 2023 Gatwick recorded the longest average delay of any of the 23 UK airports that report to the Department for Transport, at 27 minutes, and the lowest proportion of flights arriving on time, at 55 per cent. London City recorded the shortest average delay of any London airport, at 13 minutes, and the highest share on time, at 72 per cent.

A fourteen minute difference in average delay, and seventeen percentage points in reliability, is the gap between an airport where you plan for disruption and one where you mostly do not. Both figures come from the London Assembly Research Unit's October 2025 data pack, which cites Department for Transport table AVI0103 published in December 2024.

That is the part you can influence. The rest of this guide is about what the law gives you once it happens, which is more than most travellers realise and considerably more than the airline's staff will offer you unprompted.

Which flights the law covers

The rules are UK261, which is UK Reg (EU) No. 261/2004. The Department for Transport's air passenger travel guide sets out its scope: your flight is covered if it departs from an airport in the UK on any airline, arrives at an airport in the UK on an EU or UK airline, or arrives at an airport in the EU on a UK airline.

That last clause is the one that catches people. A UK airline departing from the United States and returning to the United States is outside the regime, and so is a non EU or UK airline landing you back in Britain from Canada. The destination being the United Kingdom is not on its own sufficient.

The compensation bands

Compensation is owed if you arrive at your final destination more than three hours late, and the amount is fixed by the distance the flight would have covered rather than by what you paid. The Civil Aviation Authority's figures are:

Distance is measured by the great circle route, the shortest path between two points on the earth's surface, and the CAA directs passengers to a third party calculator to work it out. A flight from Glasgow to Amsterdam falls under 1,500 km. A flight from London to New York is over 3,500 km and therefore falls into the band that pays either 260 or 520 pounds depending on how late you actually arrive.

The structure means long haul flights are worth checking most carefully. A London to New York arrival four hours late is a 520 pound entitlement, and the tiered band exists precisely because long delays on long flights are more likely to breach the threshold badly.

The word that decides most claims

Compensation is not due if the airline considers the delay to be caused by extraordinary circumstances. The Department for Transport's travel guide gives the examples it has in mind: the suspension of flights due to bad weather, natural disasters, delays due to air traffic control decisions, birds striking an aircraft, and political instability.

Two things are worth separating here. The assessment is the airline's to make, not yours, and the airline bears the burden of demonstrating that the cause was outside its control rather than inside it. And the definition is deliberately narrow. A full crew, an aircraft fault, a late inbound aircraft or a strike by the airline's own staff are all within the airline's gift, and none of them is extraordinary.

The Civil Aviation Authority maintains a public statement process for these assessments, including a dedicated statement on passenger compensation following NATS disruption, so it is possible to see how individual incidents have been treated.

Care is separate from compensation, and it starts earlier

This is the most practically useful part of the regime and the least advertised. Your right to care does not depend on the airline being at fault, and the threshold arrives earlier than the compensation threshold.

The CAA sets the thresholds by distance: at least two hours for flights under 1,500 km, three hours for flights between 1,500 and 3,500 km, and four hours for flights over 3,500 km. Once you pass the relevant threshold you are entitled to food and drink, two phone calls or emails, and where you are delayed overnight, accommodation and transport between the airport and that accommodation.

The travel guide states the same threshold in a flatter way, giving care for a cancellation or denied boarding where you are waiting for an alternative flight, and for a long delay of at least two hours.

You are not obliged to accept whatever the airline offers by default. The CAA states that if an airline cannot or does not organise care, you may make your own arrangements and claim the costs back, and that you should keep itemised receipts. It also notes that airlines are unlikely to treat alcohol, luxury hotels or luxury meals as reasonable, which is the practical limit on that right.

Refunds, rerouting and the fourteen day rule

If your flight is delayed by at least five hours, you can choose not to travel and take a refund for the flights you have not yet taken. The CAA is explicit that you should not take this option if you still intend to travel.

For cancellations by the airline, the travel guide gives a choice between a refund paid within seven days, with a return flight to the first point of departure at the earliest opportunity where applicable, and being re-routed under comparable conditions. If the cancellation came within 14 days of the scheduled departure time, you may also be entitled to compensation, and that turns on the amount of notice you received and the alternative flights available to you at the time.

Denied boarding, most often the result of overbooking, is treated as a distinct category. The airline must let you choose between a refund within seven days and re-routing under comparable conditions, and you are also entitled to compensation. The travel guide draws the distinction from being denied boarding on reasonable grounds, such as disruptive behaviour or incorrect documentation.

The eight week clock

Compensation is not automatic. You claim it from the airline first, using their own procedure, and the CAA notes that you may need one claim for compensation and a separate claim for expenses.

If you are not satisfied with their final response, or they take more than eight weeks to reply, you can escalate. The destination is an Alternative Dispute Resolution provider if the airline is signed up to one, or the CAA's in-house Passenger Advice and Complaints Team if it is not. The eight week threshold is the point at which a quiet non answer becomes something you can escalate on procedural grounds.

What to do in the first hour

If the delay has already happened, the order matters. Ask the airline what the cause is, and ask them to record it, because that single question determines whether the extraordinary circumstances exclusion may apply at all. Ask for care at the threshold distance rather than at three hours. Ask for receipts for anything you pay for. Keep the delay paperwork, including the boarding passes and any written rebooking, because compensation claims are made separately from expense claims.

Then decide the refund question deliberately rather than in the moment. The five hour threshold is a real right, but taking it abandons the journey, and the CAA says so directly.

What the figures cannot tell you

The punctuality data is from 2023, the most recent year in the Department for Transport table at the time of writing, and it describes a year that has since passed. Airport performance swings with weather, staffing and capacity in ways that no annual average captures, and the average delay figure says nothing about how the delays are distributed, so an airport with a modest mean can still have a long tail of bad days.

The compensation figures are current and set in law, but they are applied by airlines and then contested, and the escalation route exists precisely because the first answer is not always the right one. And nothing in the regime tells you which flight to book. The only way to compare reliability is to price the routes themselves, which is worth doing before you commit rather than after you are delayed. FlyraGo, which supported the research behind this guide, compares schedules and fares across airlines and travel agencies so that the practical alternatives on a disrupted route are visible at the point of booking.