Airlines must pay up to $2,081 per passenger on international trips and up to $4,700 on US domestic trips. What that means for your bag, in plain English.
There are two ceilings, and which one applies depends on your ticket, not on the airline.
International trips (any flight on the ticket crossed a border): the Montreal Convention caps the airline’s liability at 1,519 Special Drawing Rights per passenger. SDRs are an IMF currency unit; at 1.37 US dollars each that is about $2,081. The cap was raised to this figure on 28 December 2024; many airline pages still print the old 1,288 SDR.
Trips within the United States: US Department of Transportation rules cap liability at $4,700 per passenger (effective 22 January 2025). Airlines may not set a lower limit, and they may not apply a blanket depreciation formula to what you paid.
The cap is a ceiling, not an offer. What you actually recover is what you can show: the contents of the bag at replacement cost, minus reasonable depreciation on older items, plus what you had to buy while the bag was missing. On an international trip the bag fee is refunded on top of the cap when the bag is late enough.
Work out your own claim → Two minutes to your amount and deadlines.
Take a bag lost on a flight from New York to London. Inside: a two-year-old laptop bought for $1,200 that costs $1,300 to replace, a suit and two shirts bought for $640 six months ago, running shoes at $140, a toiletries kit at $85, headphones at $300, and the suitcase itself, three years old, $280. At replacement cost the contents come to about $2,745. The airline’s limit on that trip is $2,081 per passenger, so the claim asks for $2,081, plus $251 of clothes and toiletries bought while waiting, plus the $75 bag fee refunded on top. The airline cannot use the cap to swallow the bag fee, and it cannot use depreciation to get below what you can document.
The same bag lost on a flight from Dallas to Boston sits under the DOT rule instead: the airline must pay at least up to $4,700 per passenger, so the whole $2,745 is inside the limit and the claim asks for all of it.
Per passenger. Two bags on one ticket share one limit; two passengers on one booking each have their own, even if everything was packed in one suitcase. A family of four on an international trip has four limits of $2,081, and the claim should list whose things were whose so the airline cannot settle the whole family against one.
It will try. Neither the Montreal Convention nor the DOT rule sets a depreciation table, and the DOT has told US airlines that arbitrary formulas and category exclusions are unfair practices. Claim replacement cost item by item. Where an item is old enough that a deduction is hard to refuse, the four-year-old suitcase, say, know the least you should accept for it before the airline names a number. Toiletries, medication and anything under a year old count at full value.
Most people cannot prove all of it, and the rules do not require receipts for everything. Bank statements, order histories, photographs of the packed bag or of you wearing the clothes, and a consistent itemized list carry weight. What loses claims is a round-number guess with no list behind it. Build the list first, then attach whatever evidence exists for the big items.
From the same rule tables the claim letter uses: the current SDR limit at 1.37 US dollars per SDR, the DOT minimum since 22 January 2025, and the bag-fee refund clocks. Enter the trip and the contents and the estimate shows the cap, the replacement total, the floor you should not go under, and the deadlines, before anything is signed.
Per passenger, whatever the number of bags on the ticket.
Only if your documented loss is less than the cap. The cap limits what they must pay, not what they may offer; you set the number with your itemized list.