The airline’s own reporting deadlines and its verified claim channels, checked by a person against the airline’s pages. Pick your airline.
Flying a regional brand? American Eagle, United Express and Delta Connection bags are claimed from the mainline airline; those pages say how.
By a person, against the airline’s own baggage pages, not scraped. Each entry on an airline’s page carries the date it was last checked (most recently 2026-10-21) and a link to the page it was checked against. A channel that no longer answers is marked retired rather than deleted, so a claim already sent to it still has a record. 55 airlines are listed today; they are the ones most people in the United States fly.
Not the airline: the trip. Any ticket that crosses a border is governed by the Montreal Convention, whichever airline flies it, with a limit of 1,519 SDR per passenger, about $2,081. A trip entirely within the United States falls under the DOT rule, with a floor of $4,700 per passenger. A foreign airline flying you from New York to its home country is under the Convention; a US airline flying you from Denver to Miami is under the DOT rule; the same US airline flying you to Toronto is under the Convention. The airline pages state both figures and note where the airline’s own page still prints an old one.
They are the airline’s own rules for the first report: how soon after landing it wants a missing bag or damage reported, when it treats a bag as lost, and how many days it gives for the written claim. Missing the first-report window does not cancel your legal rights, but it hands the airline an argument, so the pages print the windows next to the date they were checked. The legal deadlines sit underneath: on an international trip, a written claim within 7 days for damage and 21 days for delay, and 2 years to sue.
Trust the date. An airline’s baggage page changes without notice, and a claims email that worked in spring can be retired by autumn. If a channel on this site bounces or a window on the airline’s page differs from the one printed here, the page you are looking at wins for today and a note to us gets the directory corrected, usually the same day. Where the airline’s page still prints an old liability figure, the airline page here says so, because a claim that cites the old number invites a reply that uses it.
The rules are the same. Build your claim and send it to the address on your airport report or the airline’s baggage page, and tell us which airline it was; the directory grows from those messages.