Lost or Delayed Luggage: What the Airline Owes You

• $4,700

  Domestic liability cap, per passenger

• 1,519 SDR

  International cap (~$2,000)

• 12 hours

  Delay that refunds your domestic bag fee

• 21 days

  Deadline to claim for a delayed bag abroad

Almost everything written about lost luggage is either an airline’s own page, which understates what you can claim, or a legal summary that never mentions the deadline that will actually end your claim. The rules are not complicated. There are two caps, three deadlines and one federal refund that arrives automatically if you file the right form at the right moment.

Two regimes, and which one you are under

Which set of rules applies depends on the itinerary, not the flight the bag went missing on.

An itinerary with any international segment on the same ticket is generally governed by the Montreal Convention end to end — including the domestic connection that fed it. That usually means a lower cap and much stricter deadlines than a purely domestic trip, which is the opposite of what most travelers assume.

The two numbers that cap everything

The domestic figure is the maximum liability limit a U.S. carrier is permitted to set. The Department of Transportation raised it from $3,800 to $4,700 with effect from 22 January 2025, as part of the periodic inflation revision that also updates denied boarding compensation. Airlines may choose to pay more than their limit and occasionally do as a goodwill gesture; none is obliged to.

The first hour: what to do at the airport

Everything downstream depends on what you do before leaving the airport.

1. File a mishandled baggage report in person. At the baggage service desk, before you leave. Not by phone the next morning. The automatic bag fee refund and most claims depend on this report existing.
2. Get a written reference number. Photograph it. Every future conversation starts with it.
3. Photograph the bag tag and your boarding pass. Along with the receipt for any bag fee you paid.
4. Give a delivery address you will actually be at. Hotels are fine; a home address for a bag arriving while you are still away is not.
5. Ask what the airline will reimburse. Get the answer in writing if you can, and note the name of who said it.

If the bag never turns up, the report is the entire foundation of the claim. If it turns up in a day, the report is what refunds your bag fee. There is no version of this where filing it was the wrong call.

The bag fee refund almost nobody claims

Since a 2024 Department of Transportation rule in force from October 2024, your checked bag fee comes back automatically when the bag is significantly delayed. Automatically means you should not have to ask — though in practice, filing the report and following up in writing is what makes it happen.

The refund goes back to the original form of payment — not a voucher — within seven business days for card purchases and twenty calendar days for anything else. The one condition is the mishandled baggage report, which is why it is the first item on the list above.

What you can spend while you wait

While the bag is delayed you can claim reasonable, necessary interim expenses: clothing, toiletries, and the things you genuinely need because your luggage is somewhere else. Airlines do not publish a fixed daily allowance and their generosity varies, but three rules hold everywhere.

• Buy modestly and keep every receipt. Replacements, not upgrades. A claim that includes a designer coat invites an argument about the whole submission.
• Put it on one card. Producing a clean statement is worth more than any individual receipt.
• Expect deduction. Anything reimbursed as an interim expense is generally deducted from the final payout if the bag is later declared lost. You are being made whole once, not twice.

When a delayed bag becomes a lost one

There is no federal definition of when a delayed bag becomes a lost one. Most U.S. airlines declare it somewhere between 5 and 14 days, and the exact number sits in each carrier’s contract of carriage. Until that point it is officially delayed, which still entitles you to interim expenses and to the bag fee refund.

Once declared lost, you submit an itemized claim: what was in the bag, what each item is worth, and evidence for anything expensive. Expect the airline to ask for receipts, photographs or serial numbers on electronics, and expect the process to take weeks rather than days. Submit in writing, keep a copy, and escalate in writing rather than by phone — the same approach that works for a cancellation refund.

The deadlines that end claims

On international itineraries these are absolute. No court can extend them and no goodwill gesture reopens them.

Domestic deadlines come from the airline’s own contract of carriage rather than federal rules, and several require notice of damage within 24 hours. The safe habit either way is to report on the day, in writing, and worry about the value of the claim afterwards.

Why the payout is smaller than the cap

The caps are ceilings on what you may claim, not estimates of what you will receive. Airlines pay depreciated value: what your two-year-old jacket is worth today, not what you paid for it. A suitcase of clothing that cost $2,000 over several years might settle at a few hundred dollars.

Every airline’s contract of carriage also excludes or sharply limits liability for a familiar list — cash, jewelry, electronics, cameras, medication, documents, keys, business samples and anything fragile. This is not fine print to be annoyed about; it is a packing instruction. Those items belong in your carry-on, which is one more reason a fare that includes a carry-on is worth more than its price gap suggests, as the budget airline arithmetic makes clear.

Where your credit card fits

Many travel credit cards include baggage delay and lost luggage coverage when the ticket was bought with the card, and the delay trigger is often shorter than the federal bag fee threshold — six hours is common. That coverage frequently pays faster than the airline and with less argument.

Claim from both. Card benefits are typically secondary to the airline’s liability rather than a replacement for it, which means the card covers what the airline does not, and both need the same evidence: the mishandled baggage report, the receipts and the itemized list. Which cards carry which protections is part of the card comparison.

The parts you can control

The regulations decide what you can recover. These decide whether you need to.

• Longer connections. Mishandling is overwhelmingly a connection problem, and a tight transfer is the single largest controllable risk — the buffers are in the connecting flight guide.
• A tracker in the bag. Most major airlines now accept a passenger’s own tracker location as evidence, which changes the conversation from “we are looking” to “it is in Lisbon”.
• A change of clothes in the carry-on. One day of normality for almost no weight.
• Photograph the packed bag. Thirty seconds that make an itemized claim credible.
• Remove old tags. A stale barcode is still a barcode, and sorting systems read them.

None of this is exciting, and all of it is the difference between a ruined week and an inconvenience with a refund attached. The rest of the passenger-rights set is in what you are owed when a flight is cancelled or delayed and what you are owed if you are bumped.