Montreal Convention: Claims, Liability Caps & Where to Sue

The Montreal Convention is an international treaty that sets uniform rules for airline liability when something goes wrong on an international flight, covering passenger injury and death, lost or damaged baggage, and delays. Finalized in 1999, it replaced the older Warsaw system and now governs nearly all cross-border air travel because most countries have signed on. One thing many online resources still get wrong: ICAO raised the treaty’s compensation caps effective December 28, 2024, so claims filed in 2025 and later work from higher numbers than earlier guides show.¹

Which Flights It Covers

The treaty applies to any international flight carrying passengers, baggage, or cargo for payment, as long as the departure and arrival airports sit in two different countries that have signed the Convention.² A round trip beginning and ending in the same country still counts if it has a scheduled stop abroad.

Purely domestic flights are not covered. If you fly city-to-city inside one country with no international leg, your national aviation rules apply instead. Military flights on aircraft reserved for a country’s armed forces are also outside the treaty.

What You Can Claim For

Injury or Death

An airline is liable when a passenger suffers bodily injury or dies in an accident that happens on board, or while boarding or leaving the aircraft.² “Accident” has a narrow legal meaning here. The U.S. Supreme Court defined it as an unexpected or unusual event external to the passenger.³ Severe turbulence throwing an unbuckled passenger into the overhead bins qualifies. A blood clot developing from a pre-existing condition during normal operations does not.

Whether purely psychological harm counts, absent any physical injury, depends on where you sue. A 2022 European court ruling accepted standalone psychological injury claims, while U.S. courts have generally required some physical component.

Baggage

Airlines are automatically liable when checked baggage is destroyed, lost, damaged, or delayed while in their custody.² Carry-on bags and personal items are treated differently: the airline is liable only if you can show fault by the carrier or its staff. So a crushed checked suitcase is on the airline by default; a damaged carry-on requires you to prove someone did something wrong.

Delay

You can recover actual financial losses caused by a delay, such as hotel stays, meals, and missed prepaid bookings.⁴ Frustration and inconvenience alone are not compensable. The airline escapes liability if it proves it took every reasonable measure to prevent the delay or that prevention was impossible.

How Much You Can Recover

Compensation is measured in Special Drawing Rights, an international reserve asset maintained by the IMF rather than a spendable currency. ICAO reviews the caps every five years, and the most recent revision took effect December 28, 2024.¹

Injury and Death: Two Tiers

For personal injury and death, the Convention uses a two-tier structure. Up to 151,880 SDRs, the airline is strictly liable and has no fault-based defense.¹ Above that figure, you can still recover more, but the airline gets to defend itself by proving the damage was not caused by its negligence. There is no absolute ceiling on injury and death claims. The 151,880 SDR line just marks where the airline’s defenses begin.

Baggage and Delay Caps

Baggage claims are capped at 1,519 SDRs per passenger. Delay claims are capped at 6,303 SDRs per passenger.¹ The limit is per passenger, not per bag. Two travelers who each check luggage each have their own 1,519 SDR cap if both bags are lost.

Converting to Dollars

Because SDRs are not a spendable currency, you convert to your local currency when you file. The IMF publishes daily rates.⁵ At an early-2026 rate of roughly $1.36 per SDR, the strict-liability injury tier runs about $206,500, the baggage cap about $2,066, and the delay cap about $8,570. Rates move daily, so check on the day you submit.

Declaring a Higher Baggage Value

If you check something expensive, you can declare a higher value at check-in and pay a supplementary fee. That declaration replaces the standard 1,519 SDR cap for that bag with the amount you declared.² Useful for camera gear, instruments, and similar equipment. The airline can still contest the payout if it shows the declared value was more than the contents were actually worth.

Defenses That Can Shrink or Kill Your Claim

Two defenses matter most. For delay claims, the airline avoids liability entirely if it proves every reasonable measure was taken to prevent the delay, or that prevention was impossible.⁴

Contributory negligence applies to every category of claim, including injury and death. If the airline proves your own actions contributed to the harm, your recovery can be reduced proportionally or wiped out.² A passenger who ignores the seatbelt sign and is injured in turbulence can see compensation cut. The airline carries the burden of proof, but this defense gets raised regularly.

Where You Can Sue

The Convention restricts where you can file a lawsuit. For every type of claim, you have four choices:⁶

The airline’s country of incorporation.
The country where the airline has its principal place of business.
The country where you bought the ticket, if the airline has a business office there.
Your scheduled destination country.

For death and injury only, a fifth option is available: the country where you have your principal and permanent residence, provided the airline operates flights to or from that country and maintains business premises there, whether directly or through a code-share partner.⁶ Your nationality is irrelevant. What matters is where you actually live at the time of the accident.

If your ticket was sold by one airline but flown by another, both can be sued. The ticketing carrier is liable for the whole journey as booked, and the operating carrier is liable for the segment it actually flew.

The Convention Is Your Only Route

If a claim falls within the Convention’s scope, the Convention is your exclusive remedy. You cannot go around it with a state-law negligence suit, a consumer-protection claim, or a breach-of-contract action designed to escape its limits. U.S. courts established this under the earlier Warsaw Convention and have applied the same rule to Montreal: covered claims must be brought under the treaty’s terms or not at all.

Claims outside the Convention’s scope, like a frequent-flyer program dispute or a discrimination complaint, may still proceed under local law because they are not about carriage-related injury, baggage, or delay.

How This Differs From EU Regulation 261/2004

Flights touching the European Union often trigger rights under both the Convention and EU Regulation 261/2004, and travelers regularly confuse the two. EU 261 gives fixed automatic compensation for cancellations and long delays: €250 for short flights, €400 for medium distances, €600 for long-haul. You do not need to prove any financial loss to collect. The Montreal Convention requires you to prove actual out-of-pocket costs from the delay.

When both apply, EU courts have generally allowed compensation paid under one to be deducted from the other to avoid double recovery. In practice, EU 261 is more useful for the typical delayed passenger, while the Convention becomes important when provable losses exceed the EU flat rates or when the flight never touches EU territory.

Deadlines You Cannot Miss

The Convention’s deadlines are absolute. Miss them and your right to recover is gone.

Damaged checked baggage: written complaint to the airline within 7 days of receiving the bag.⁷
Delayed baggage: written complaint within 21 days of the date the bag was returned.⁷
Lawsuit: filed within 2 years from the date of arrival, the date arrival was scheduled, or the date the carriage stopped.⁷

Send complaints by registered mail or through the airline’s official claims portal so you can prove the date. The 7-day and 21-day windows are tight, so write to the airline as soon as you notice a problem rather than waiting to tally the full loss. The two-year lawsuit clock is not a guideline. Courts treat it as a hard cutoff with no extension mechanism in the treaty itself.

Documentation to Gather

For baggage claims, get a Property Irregularity Report from the airline’s service desk at the airport before you leave.⁸ That report creates an official record with a tracking reference. Leaving the airport without one makes the claim much harder.

Keep your booking confirmation, boarding passes, and baggage claim tags. For delay expenses, hold on to itemized receipts for necessities like toiletries, replacement clothing, meals, and hotel stays. Airlines routinely reject discretionary or oversized purchases, so keep amounts reasonable. When you fill out the airline’s claim form, include the flight number, dates, a plain description of what happened, and an itemized list with dollar amounts, plus copies of every supporting document. A complete first submission avoids the back-and-forth that stretches claims out for months.

1
International Civil Aviation Organization. 2024 Revised Limits of Liability Under the Montreal Convention of 1999
2
IATA. Montreal Convention Full Text
3
Library of Congress. Air France v Saks, 470 US 392
4
The Florida Bar. Stranded: Navigating Aviation Delay Damages Under the Montreal Convention
5
International Monetary Fund. SDRs per Currency Unit and Currency Units per SDR
6
U.S. Department of State. Montreal Convention
7
U.S. Department of State. Convention for the Unification of Certain Rules for International Carriage by Air
8
U.S. Department of Transportation. Lost, Delayed, or Damaged Baggage