The government intends to make it illegal for airlines to charge parents to sit next to their own children, and the fact that this needs a law in 2026 tells you everything. Under the plan, carriers will have to seat children under 14 beside a parent or accompanying adult at no cost. Prime Minister Andy Burnham called the practice “a rip-off, plain and simple”, which is one of the rare political soundbites that holds up under scrutiny. I fly often enough to have watched this fee creep from a quirk of low-cost carriers into a standard line item across the booking flow.
Why I assumed this was already the rule
Most people walk into a booking page believing the airline will obviously put a six-year-old next to their mum. It reads as a safety issue rather than a revenue one. The booking interface reinforces that belief: you see a seat map, you see your party grouped together, and the whole thing looks handled.
The Civil Aviation Authority did have guidance here. It said airlines should “aim” to seat parents close to their children. Aim is a generous verb. It carries no penalty, no deadline and no enforcement, which makes it purely a suggestion.
How airlines got away with charging parents to sit together
Guidance is not law, so non-compliance costs nothing. The only thing that moved the market was an actual investigation. The Competition and Markets Authority looked at Ryanair, which was charging roughly £8 each way for the privilege of sitting beside your child, and Ryanair changed its policy in June.
That was one operator responding to regulatory pressure, not an industry rethinking its ethics. Everyone else carried on, because nothing obliged them to stop. The commercial logic is obvious enough: a fee that feels unavoidable converts better than one a customer can shrug off.
The numbers & the legislation
The Department for Transport, in figures published alongside the announcement, puts the cost of a parent and child sitting together at up to £104 on a return trip. That is not a trivial sum for a family already absorbing school-holiday pricing. Ryanair’s site now confirms that children aged two to 11 must sit next to an accompanying adult, and that random seat allocation still places them together free of charge, which rather proves the fee was never a technical constraint.
The vehicle is the Civil Aviation Bill, currently working through the UK Parliament. It gives ministers a flexible power to set out a list of passenger rights and duties, alongside measures on name-change fees and disruptive passengers. Ministers reportedly want the family seating rules live before next summer’s school holidays.
The US took a similar run at this. Its Department of Transportation proposed banning family seating junk fees – add-on charges with no real service behind them – and guaranteeing adjacent seats within 48 hours of booking. That status has since been muddied by legal challenge, a useful reminder that regulation is not permanent just because it exists.
Free is not the same as good
Nobody should expect airlines to simply absorb this. The likelier outcome is that family seating shifts in timing rather than vanishing as a commercial lever. Reporting on selection models like Ryanair’s has already flagged the risk: families may not learn their allocation until after check-in, and are more likely to end up at the rear of the cabin.
So the law removes the charge, not the compromise. You get to sit with your child; you may do it in row 32, next to the galley, with the toilet queue forming by your elbow. That is still a better deal than paying £104 for the same row.
What to do about it
Check in as early as the system allows, because cabin position may still reward whoever acts fastest. Treat paid seat selection as a choice about quality rather than a ransom: bulkhead, extra legroom and exit rows are still worth money if you want them. Just stop paying to avoid being split from a seven-year-old.
Parents of teenagers may feel differently, of course. If £16 buys you four hours at the opposite end of the aircraft from a 15-year-old and their headphones, that is not a junk fee, that is a holiday upgrade. The law bans airlines charging parents to sit together; nobody is stopping you paying to sit apart.
Hope was never a policy
This was never a hard problem to fix. It was a profitable one to ignore, and asking airlines to “aim” for decent behaviour bought us years of optional compliance plus a single CMA investigation. Legislating against charging parents to sit with their children is unglamorous, slightly embarrassing and absolutely correct. When a few pounds per passenger is on the table, proper regulation beats hope every time.
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