London Stansted airport delays: what you are owed, and when

Before anything else, confirm what has actually happened to your flight. The Stansted departures board carries live status, and your airline's own app is usually a few minutes ahead of it for gate and timing changes. Do not rely on the delay showing on a screen in the terminal to start any clock: the entitlements below are measured against your scheduled times and your actual arrival, both of which the airline records.

One practical warning specific to Stansted. The airport's departure boards and the airlines here run a large early-morning bank, and a disruption at 06:00 tends to cascade through the day, so a mid-morning flight may slip long after the original cause has cleared. If your inbound aircraft is late arriving, that is often the better predictor than the posted departure time, and the arrivals board will show it.

The right to care is the entitlement people most often fail to claim, partly because it does not depend on blame. Even when the delay is caused by weather, an air traffic control strike or anything else outside the airline's control, the airline must still look after you once the wait reaches a threshold set by the distance of the flight. Which conditions actually ground aircraft, and which ones airlines fly through, is set out on Stansted weather alongside the airport's own climate record.

Civil Aviation Authority guidance on delays, July 2026. Thresholds are set in law and are durable; the figures below are reviewed by the CAA.

Care means food and drink appropriate to the length of the wait, a means to communicate, and, if the delay runs overnight, accommodation plus the transport to reach it. In practice the airline hands out vouchers, and if it does not, you can buy your own and reclaim reasonable costs. Reasonable is the operative word: the CAA notes that airlines are unlikely to accept claims for alcohol, luxury hotels or expensive meals, so keep receipts modest and keep them all.

Separately, once a delay reaches 5 hours you gain the right to abandon the trip entirely and take a refund for the parts of the booking you have not flown. That is a genuine choice rather than a formality. Taking it ends the airline's duty to carry you onward, so it suits a trip that no longer works rather than one you still need to make, though if you abandon a journey part-way through the airline must still get you back to where you started.

Compensation is separate from care, and it is the part most often misunderstood. It is triggered by how late you arrive at your final destination, not by how late you left Stansted. A flight that pushes back 150 minutes late and makes up an hour in the air arrives inside the threshold and pays nothing. The amounts are fixed per person and take no account of what you paid for the ticket.

Civil Aviation Authority compensation figures, July 2026. All amounts are per person, including children on their own ticket.

Stansted's network is overwhelmingly short and medium haul, so the £220 and £350 bands cover almost every claim made from this airport. Amsterdam and Dublin sit comfortably in the lower band; Málaga, Istanbul and the Canaries fall into the middle one. The over-3,500km band is not academic here, though: the daily Emirates service to Dubai clears it, so a long-haul passenger from Stansted is in the £260 and £520 rows. Where a booking covers more than one flight, the distance is measured between the first and last airport on the booking, not leg by leg.

The exception the airlines lean on hardest is extraordinary circumstances: events they argue were outside their control, such as extreme weather, air traffic control strikes or a security alert. Those remove the compensation but leave the care and the refund rights untouched, which is worth knowing when an airline replies to a claim by denying everything at once. Read the list the regulator actually publishes: weather incompatible with safe operation, strikes unrelated to the airline, terrorism or sabotage, security risks, political or civil unrest, and hidden manufacturing defects. An ordinary technical fault is not on it, so a refusal that blames one deserves a challenge.

A cancellation gives you a choice the airline cannot make for you: a full refund of the unused parts of the ticket, or an alternative flight to the same destination at a time that suits you. The regulator is explicit that the timing is yours to pick: you may fly as soon as possible after the cancelled flight, or at a later date that suits you. Care applies while you wait, on the same terms as a delay.

Compensation on a cancellation depends on notice and on how badly the replacement flight misses your original times. More than 14 days' warning means no compensation. Inside that, the fixed sums run from £110 to £520:

Civil Aviation Authority cancellation tables, July 2026. The 7 to 14 day rows apply where the replacement departs more than two hours before the original.

With less than seven days' notice there is one carve-out worth knowing: if the replacement leaves no more than an hour early and lands less than two hours late, no compensation is due. Airlines rebooking at short notice aim at exactly that window, so check the new times against it before assuming a claim exists.

If the disruption leaves you at Stansted overnight, accommodation and the transport to reach it are part of the right to care, not a goodwill gesture. The airline may book a hotel and tell you where to go, or ask you to book your own and reclaim it. If nobody is answering and the desks have closed, book something reasonable, keep the receipt and claim it back.

Practically, the hotels closest to the terminal fill first on a night of mass disruption. The two you can walk to are covered on the Stansted hotels page, and the wider ring including the motorway hotels at Junction 8 is there too, which is where rooms tend to remain when the walk-to hotels have gone. If nothing is available at any price, sleeping at the airport covers what the terminal is actually like overnight, and it is not somewhere the airport encourages people to stay.

Claim from the airline, in writing, and only from the airline. Stansted operates the buildings and the runway; every obligation on this page belongs to the carrier that ran the flight, and the airport cannot pay compensation, rebook you or refund a ticket. The Stansted contact directory sets out which organisation owns which problem, including bags, parking and the airport's own services.

Send the booking reference, the flight number and date, the scheduled and actual times, and receipts for anything you are reclaiming. The airline has up to 8 weeks to give a final answer. If it refuses, or that deadline passes in silence, escalate to the alternative dispute resolution scheme the airline belongs to, or to the Civil Aviation Authority's passenger advice and complaints team where the airline is not in a scheme. Both are free.

Do not feel rushed. The Court of Appeal held in 2014 that a UK261 claim is a sum recoverable under an enactment rather than a Montreal Convention claim, which gives it a six-year limitation period in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Scotland's prescription period is five years. Either way it is far longer than the window airlines' own claim forms imply. And be sceptical of a first refusal citing extraordinary circumstances without explaining what happened: the burden of proving that defence sits with the airline, not with you.