Damaged Luggage Claim Rules: What Airlines Refuse to Pay For

The wheel shears off somewhere between the hold and carousel four. You take the bag to the desk, the agent turns it over, and points at a line in the contract of carriage that says the airline does not pay for wheels. That line is real. Whether it holds is a different question, and the answer sits in two documents almost nobody reads side by side: the carrier’s own contract, and the notice the US Department of Transportation sent airlines after inspecting baggage operations at 16 US airports.

So we read both. We opened every carrier’s own policy page on a single day, lifted the exclusion clause out word for word, put the link to it in the same row, and recorded the deadline each airline gives you to report the damage. Then we lined every clause up against the DOT position and flagged the ones that do not agree with it. Nothing here is summarized from a third party. If we could not load a carrier’s page, that carrier is not in the table.

Two things this page is not. It isn’t legal advice, and it isn’t a claim service taking a cut of your case. We make our money reviewing bags, so we have no stake in whether you file. The companion piece on airline compensation for lost or delayed luggage covers the bag that never arrives; this one covers the bag that arrives broken.

Twenty-four carriers, in their own words

Open a row and you get the clause verbatim, both reporting deadlines with the sentence each one came from, the published liability caps, our read against the DOT position with the reasoning, and the link to file. A green No conflict means the written wording does not contradict the federal position. It is not a promise that the airline will pay you.

The DOT column works the same way on every row. We read the wording the carrier published against the position the Department has stated, for all 24 carriers, and a cell is blank only where the source we read does not settle a verdict. Where the Department’s authority reaches is a separate question from what a clause says, and the flag answers the second one.

What the Department of Transportation requires

The consumer-facing position is one sentence long and it is not ambiguous. “Although airlines are not required to cover fair wear and tear, airlines cannot exclude liability for damage to wheels, handles, straps, and other components of checked baggage.” That is the whole rule, published on the Department’s own lost, delayed or damaged baggage page.

Fair wear and tear is the carve-out, and it is a narrow one. A scuff on a shell after four years of ordinary handling is wear and tear. A sheared wheel mount on the first trip is not, and the enforcement notice says so directly: “The Enforcement Office considers categorical exclusions for damage to specific parts of the checked baggage to be arbitrary limitations of liability in violation of Part 254. Although carriers are not required to cover fair wear and tear, damage to handles,…” The notice is signed by the Assistant General Counsel for Aviation Enforcement and Proceedings and you can read the enforcement notice in full.

One passage matters more than travelers realize, because it governs the moment you are standing at the desk. Carriers have to write the report down even when the agent is certain the claim will not be paid. “In addition to categorically disclaiming liability for certain damage, certain carriers are inappropriately refusing to accept claims or reports of such damage. To avoid an unfair practice of categorically disclaiming liability without proper investigation, all reports of mishandled baggage should…” Refusing to take the report is itself the violation. If an agent will not open a file, that is the line to know.

The scope reaches further than US-flag airlines. The inspection behind the notice covered US and foreign carriers at 16 US airports, which is why two carriers based outside the US show up flagged in the table above. The flag is our read of their written wording, not a claim that the Department governs how they operate at home.

On money, the ceiling is set by rule and not by negotiation. For a domestic US itinerary the maximum permitted limitation is $4,700 per passenger under 14 CFR 254.4, and all 10 US carriers in the table publish exactly that figure. For an international itinerary the Montreal Convention governs and the limit is 1,519 SDR, roughly $2,175. The older 1,288 SDR figure is still published by 2 of the carriers in the table, and their rows flag it.

Where the written policy and the DOT position part company

Of the 24 carriers, 9 name wheels or handles in writing. Most of them are fine, and that surprised us. Alaska, Hawaiian, Frontier, Spirit and United all tie the exclusion to the bag’s own inherent defect or to fair wear and tear from ordinary handling, which is exactly the carve-out the notice allows. A clause that names a wheel is not automatically a clause that breaks the rule. What it is tied to decides that, which is why every row carries the qualifier as well as the quote.

Two US carriers land in the middle, and we called them unclear, not guilty. American’s wording is “Damage to or loss from normal wear and tear to parts that stick out like wheels, straps, pockets, handles, hooks or other attachments”, which can be read as excluding all damage to parts that stick out, or only wear-and-tear damage to them. One reading is prohibited and the other is permitted, and the sentence does not settle it. JetBlue’s clause is properly qualified but offers “the ordinary handling of baggage” as a ground standing apart from fair wear and tear, which reaches past the carve-out the notice describes. Neither is a smoking gun. Both are worth knowing about before you stand at a desk.

The two clean conflicts are both carriers based outside the US that fly into it. Qantas lists retractable and fixed luggage handles, wheels, feet, locks and straps as damage it will not pay for. Singapore Airlines names straps, pull handles and wheels as protruding parts outside its liability. Those are categorical component exclusions of the exact shape the notice told carriers serving US airports to remove.

A larger group publishes no component exclusion at all: 14 of the 24 carriers, 3 of them US. Delta, Southwest and Allegiant carve out preexisting damage and ordinary wear and tear and stop there, and 11 carriers based elsewhere read the same way. That isn’t a promise to pay for your wheel. It does mean there’s no written line for an agent to point at.

Exactly 2 rows carry no verdict, and the reason is the same on both. Air Canada publishes a damaged-straps exclusion with no wear-and-tear qualifier attached, which is the shape the notice treats as categorical, but the source we read stops short of settling it. WestJet is the same. We’d rather leave a cell blank than manufacture a verdict, so both say Not assessed and the reasoning sits in the row. Being based outside the US is not what empties a cell: 14 of these carriers are, and 12 of those carry a verdict.

What to do at the carousel

The deadlines in the table are the reason to act before you leave the airport, not after you get home. Four hours is the shortest window any carrier publishes and 3 of them use it; 2 more give you six. By the time you have unpacked and noticed the cracked shell, the window on a domestic ticket may already have closed.

• Report it at the airport, in person, before you leave. Almost every domestic deadline in the table is measured from arrival, and most carriers want the bag present for inspection.
• Get the file reference number. A verbal “we’ve logged it” isn’t a record. Ask for the number and photograph it.
• Photograph the bag before you hand it over, including the airline tag still attached and the damage in the same frame.
• If the agent will not take the report, say so politely and ask again. The enforcement notice quoted above tells carriers to accept every report regardless of whether they expect to pay it.
• Keep the tag, the boarding pass and the receipt for the bag if you still have it. Replacement value is easier to argue with a price attached.

Prevention does more than any of this. A hard shell takes a drop better than a soft one, which is the whole argument behind hardside luggage, and a cheap set of luggage straps keeps a burst zipper from becoming a scattered wardrobe. An AirTag in the bag won’t stop the damage, but it tells you where the bag went, which matters when the airline and the record disagree.

Questions we get asked

Does the airline have to pay for a broken wheel?

On a US itinerary, a categorical “we never pay for wheels” is not something a carrier is allowed to write, and the Department has said so in a signed enforcement notice. What a carrier can decline is fair wear and tear. So the answer turns on the wheel: a mount sheared clean off on the first trip is damage, a wheel worn round after sixty flights is wear. The table shows you which carriers have written the exclusion anyway and what each one tied it to.

What counts as fair wear and tear?

Every carrier in the table draws the line in roughly the same place, and several of them list the same words: scuffs, scratches, dents, stains, minor cuts and dirt. Delta adds broken zippers caused by overpacking, which is worth reading twice if you sit on your suitcase to close it. Structural damage, a cracked shell, a torn seam or a handle pulled out of its housing is not on anybody’s wear-and-tear list.

How long do I have to report the damage?

Less than folk wisdom suggests, and it varies more than you’d expect. The shortest domestic window in the table is 4 hours. Delta cut its domestic window to six hours for tickets issued from October 2025 onward and kept twenty-four for tickets issued before that, which is the kind of detail that only exists in the contract. On international itineraries the Montreal Convention floor of seven days from receipt is near universal, and a delayed bag gets twenty-one days instead of seven. Sort the table by reporting deadline to see the spread.

What if the airline just says no?

Ask for the refusal in writing and ask which clause it rests on. That single question converts a conversation into a record, and the clause it names is one you can look up in the row above. If a US carrier refuses on the basis that it never pays for a component, the wording quoted in its row is the wording the Department has already addressed.

Is a good bag a better bet than a claim?

Usually, yes. A claim caps out at replacement value minus depreciation and costs you a morning. The bags that survive baggage handling tend to be the ones built for it, which is the whole point of our luggage brand guide and the reason a lifetime warranty is worth more than it sounds. If the bag never leaves your hand, none of this applies at all, which is the quiet case for carry-on luggage and for checking the numbers on our airline size chart before you fly.

How we built this, and how we keep it current

Every row came off the carrier’s own page, read on one day so the table is a snapshot rather than a scrapbook. Where a carrier publishes a contract of carriage, we quoted the contract and not the help page, because the contract is what governs. Where a help page and a contract both state a deadline, the row carries both with their own links. Quotes are capped at forty words with the source link beside them, so you can check any sentence in the table against the document it came from in one click.

Three rules kept the dataset honest, and they are worth stating because they are also the reasons a cell might look empty. Where a carrier states no exclusion for a component, the row records Not stated instead of No, because the absence of a clause is not a promise to pay. Where a source did not support a verdict, the DOT column says Not assessed instead of guessing. And where a claim-filing URL is not published, the row says so instead of dropping the line.

Two carriers that belong in a set this size are absent, and neither absence is a judgment about the airline. Aeromexico was collected and then dropped: its site served a maintenance page every way we tried it, and we’d rather run 24 verified rows than 25 with one filled in from a summary. All Nippon Airways was on our shortlist and never got read at all, so it is a gap to close on the next pass and not a row we removed.

The same standard runs through the rest of our reference work: how we measure explains the method behind the numbers, the carry-on size chart and the 62 linear inches guide carry per-airline sources the same way, the size visualizer draws two bags to true scale so a dimension stops being an abstraction, and the gear database holds the measured specs for every bag we have reviewed.

A monthly job re-fetches each source URL in the table, diffs the quoted text against what is stored, and flags anything that moved for a human to read. Airlines edit these pages without notice, which is exactly why the date on the table is generated from the data rather than typed into a sentence.