Schengen 90/180 Day Rule Calculator

The 90/180 rule in plain English

You can spend at most ninety days in the Schengen area in any one hundred and eighty day period. That is the whole rule, and everything else is detail about how the counting works. The one hundred and eighty days are not a fixed block on a calendar, like January to June. The window rolls. On every single day, you count back one hundred and eighty days from that day and add up every day you were inside the area. If the total ever passes ninety, you are overstaying, even if most of those days were months ago.

The rule covers visitors who travel without a short stay visa, including British, American, Canadian, Australian and Japanese passport holders. All twenty nine Schengen countries share the one pot of days, so a month in Spain and a month in Italy is sixty days gone, not two separate allowances. Most of the Schengen area sits inside the EU, but Iceland, Norway, Switzerland and Liechtenstein count too, while Ireland and Cyprus do not.

Two counting details catch people out. First, the day you enter counts as a full day and so does the day you leave, whatever the hour. Second, the count never pauses. A week at home between two trips does not freeze your total, it just means those seven days carry no new presence while the window slides on.

How to use this calculator, step by step

First, gather your dates. Passport stamps, boarding passes and booking emails all help, and the Entry and Exit System record builds the same list for the border officer, so your list needs to match reality. Add every trip you have taken in the last six months, one row per trip, with the day you entered and the day you left. Then add any trips you have already booked or are thinking about booking, because a planned trip is where an overstay usually hides.

Second, set the check date. Today is the honest default, but setting it to the first day of a planned trip shows you the picture the border system sees when you land. Third, read the headline number. Days left tells you what you can still use, and the longest stay figure tells you how long you could stay if you entered on the check date and stayed put. Fourth, if you are planning something new, type its length into the trip length box and read the earliest start date. That date already allows for your old days falling out of the window one by one, so you do not need to guess.

One habit makes the whole thing reliable. Recheck the count every time you book, not when you pack. Flights change, trips grow by a day, and a single extra night in June can quietly move the date you are allowed back in November.

A worked example, day by day

Say you spent 1 June to 29 June 2026 in France. Both end days count, so that trip used twenty nine days. You fly back into the area on 5 September 2026. On that day your window runs from 10 March to 5 September, so all twenty nine June days still sit inside it and you have sixty one days left. Stay the full sixty one and you must leave on 4 November 2026. Your June days then start falling out of the window at the end of November, one per day, and each day that falls out hands you a day back.

Notice what did not happen in that example. Nothing reset on 1 July, and nothing reset when the second trip began. Travellers who split the year into two halves and assume a fresh ninety days each half are the ones who get pulled aside at the gate.

Which countries count towards the ninety days

The ninety days sit in one shared pot across twenty nine countries: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. A border crossing between any two of them changes nothing. The train from Paris to Brussels is a domestic ride as far as the count is concerned, and so is the ferry from Italy to Croatia.

Four of the twenty nine sit outside the European Union: Iceland, Norway, Switzerland and Liechtenstein. They count in full, which surprises people who treat a Swiss week as time off the clock. It is not. Two EU members sit outside the pot instead. Ireland runs its own rules, and Cyprus, while committed to joining, still runs its own entry system, so days in either place use none of your ninety.

The microstates need care rather than worry. Monaco, San Marino and the Vatican have no border checks of their own and sit inside the area in practice, so days there count like days in France or Italy. Andorra keeps border posts on its roads in and out, so a trip there takes you out of the area. Keep a bus ticket or a hotel receipt from an Andorra trip, because you may need to prove the exit later.

The Entry and Exit System changed the counting

For decades the rule ran on passport stamps, and a smudged stamp could hide a multitude of sins. The EU Entry and Exit System, known as EES, now records crossings digitally instead. It began a phased rollout in October 2025, with full operation expected during 2026. Scanners register your entry and your exit, the system holds your photo and fingerprints, and it calculates your remaining allowance on the spot. An overstay shows up on a screen rather than in an argument about ink. ETIAS, the travel authorisation set to follow EES, changes who needs permission to travel, not how the days are counted. The maths on this page stays the same either way.

What an overstay actually costs

Penalties vary by country, but the menu is consistent: a fine, a recorded overstay on your file, and in serious cases an entry ban of one to three years across the whole area. The record also follows you into future visa applications, where a past overstay is one of the fastest routes to a refusal. None of that is worth an extra fortnight, and all of it is avoidable with ten minutes of counting before you book.

How to stretch your days honestly

The legal way to spend a long season in Europe is to mix Schengen time with time outside the area. The Balkans make this easy. Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and North Macedonia sit outside Schengen, so weeks spent crossing them use none of your allowance while your oldest Schengen days expire. Our three week Balkans itinerary and the Balkan bus loop both lean on that trick, pairing Croatia and Greece with long stretches outside the zone. Ireland, Cyprus and Turkey play the same role. For a stay that runs past ninety days in one country, the honest route is a long stay visa arranged before you go.

Counting a simple trip rather than a border allowance? The travel days calculator gives you days, nights and weekends between any two dates.

Common mistakes that turn into overstays

The classic mistake is the calendar split: ninety days in the first half of the year, ninety in the second, as if the allowance renewed on a fixed date. It never does. The window rolls daily, and the worked example above shows a June trip still eating your allowance in November.

The second mistake is counting nights instead of days. Hotels sell nights, borders count days, and the two numbers differ by one on every trip. A ten night holiday is eleven days of allowance, and across a long season that one extra day per trip quietly adds up to a week.

Third, people forget the small crossings. A day trip over the border, a night train that crosses at two in the morning, a cruise that docks in three Schengen ports in a week. Every calendar day with any presence inside the area counts in full, and the small days are the ones nobody wrote down.

Fourth, travellers trust the stamps. A missing exit stamp used to start arguments. Now the digital record fills the gap, and a gap in your own records becomes the problem instead. Keep boarding passes and booking confirmations for at least six months after every trip, because the burden of proof sits with you. Finally, a new passport resets nothing. The count follows the person, not the document, and the digital record links the two better than any stamp book ever did.

Awkward cases: transit, night trains and cruises

Some journeys sit on the edge of the rule. Airport transit is the common one. If you change planes inside a Schengen airport and never pass border control, you never enter, and the day does not count. Step landside for a night in a hotel and it counts like any other day.

Night trains and night ferries touch two calendar dates whenever they cross midnight on the move. Every date on which you are inside the area at any moment is a day used, so a train that leaves Italy late at night and reaches Austria at dawn spends two days of allowance on one night of sleep. Cruises catch people out because the ship feels like nowhere. It is not. Every port day inside the area counts, including the day you board and the day you step off, and a two week Mediterranean cruise can spend a quiet fourteen days of allowance before you have thought about borders at all.

When the count is not the real question

This calculator answers one question: how long can you visit? It cannot help with the longer ones. Working, studying, joining a partner or retiring inside the area all run on visas and residence permits arranged before you travel. Time spent on a national long stay visa in one country follows that country's rules rather than this count, while your short visits to the other countries still count as usual. If a move abroad is the plan, treat the ninety days as scouting time, keep the count clean while you scout, and never let a job start date talk you into a quiet overstay. A clean record is worth more than a few extra weeks.