The Schengen 90/180 rule, explained day by day
How “90 days in any 180” really works: which days count, why the window moves every day, and how to work out how long you can stay.
If you don’t need a visa to visit Europe, or you hold a short-stay visa, you can spend up to 90 days in the Schengen area in any 180-day period. It sounds simple. But the 180 days aren’t a block that starts when you arrive, and they never reset on a set date. They move, one day at a time, every day you’re there.
On any day you are in the Schengen area, look back over that day and the 179 days before it. Count every day you spent in the area, including the days you arrived and left. The total must be 90 or less, and it has to stay that way on every day of your stay.
What the rule says
The European Commission puts it in two sentences:
“If you are visiting any country in the Schengen Area, you are usually allowed to stay for a maximum of 90 days within any 180-day period. … You must count back 180 days from each day of your stay and ensure the total number does not exceed 90.”
The law behind it is the Schengen Borders Code, which allows stays of “no more than 90 days in any 180-day period, which entails considering the 180-day period preceding each day of stay”. The important word is each. There is no single 180-day period to check. There is a new one every day.
Which days count
Every calendar day you spend in the Schengen area counts as a full day, however few hours you were there. The Borders Code is explicit about the two travel days:
“The date of entry shall be considered as the first day of stay on the territory of the Member States and the date of exit shall be considered as the last day of stay on the territory of the Member States.”
- A week’s holiday from Saturday to Saturday is 8 days, not 7.
- A day trip counts as 1 day, even if you were only there for lunch.
- Overnight flights: the day that counts is the date you cross the border into the area, which can be the day after you left home.
- Days on a residence permit or a long-stay (D) visa don’t count. The manual says those stays “shall not be taken into account”.
This is the opposite of how Australia, Canada and the UK count absences for citizenship and settlement, where the travel days count as days at home. We compare all four in Do the day you leave and the day you return count?
The window moves every day
Take Alex, who doesn’t need a visa and spends a lot of 2026 in Europe: Portugal from 10 January to 8 February (30 days), Spain from 1 April to 15 May (45 days), then Italy from 20 June. Drag the date below, or press play, and watch the 180-day window slide along the year.
The window is always the day you pick and the 179 days before it. The line below is Alex’s count on every day of the year: it reaches 90 on 4 July, and from 9 July the January days start dropping out. Drag the date, or press play.
When Alex lands in Rome on 20 June, the window runs from 23 December to 20 June. It already holds the 75 days from Portugal and Spain, plus 20 June itself: 76. That leaves 14 more days, so 4 July is Alex’s last day. Still being there on 5 July would make 91, an overstay.
Notice what doesn’t help: the January trip. Those days are more than five months old by July, but they are still inside the window. They only start to drop out on 9 July, 180 days after 10 January, and then one day at a time.
How long can you stay? Count forward, not back
Here is the part that trips people up in both directions. On 1 October, Alex has used 56 of the last 180 days, so the count says 34 left. But that doesn’t mean Alex can only stay 34 days.
Because the window keeps moving, the spring and summer days keep falling out of it while Alex is away and while Alex is back. Choose “And back on 1 October” in the figure: Alex could arrive on 1 October and stay 75 days in a row, until 14 December, without ever going over 90.
Days left today and the longest stay you can make are different numbers. To plan a trip, check every day of it: on each day, the 180 days ending that day must hold 90 or fewer. That is what the Commission’s calculator does in its planning mode, and what the EU’s own online tool for the Entry/Exit System answers when you give it your dates.
Check your maths against the Commission’s example
The Commission’s calculator manual works through this example. A traveller stayed in the Schengen area from 1 to 10 January, from 1 to 30 March, and from 1 May to 9 June 2024 (80 days in all). How long could they stay if they came back on each of these dates?
| Entering on | Could stay up to | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 19 June 2024 | 20 days | 80 days are already in the window, but the 10 January days drop out during the stay |
| 7 August 2024 | 20 days, leaving by 26 August | 70 days are in the window, and the March days don’t start leaving until 28 August |
| 8 August 2024 | 50 days | From 28 August, a March day drops out for every new day added |
| 8 September 2024 | 90 days | Old days leave the window faster than the new stay fills it |
Moving the arrival date by a single day, from 7 to 8 August, changes the answer from 20 days to 50. The CitizenDays engine gets the same answers on every row; the example is one of our tests.
Mistakes that lead to overstays
- Treating the 180 days as a fixed block that starts on your first entry and then resets. It doesn’t: see Does the Schengen 180-day period reset?
- Counting each country separately. France, Italy and Greece don’t give you 90 days each. The EU says the 90 days are “calculated as a single period for all the European countries using the EES”.
- Leaving out short trips. A weekend in Amsterdam is 3 days of stay, and a day trip is 1.
- Forgetting the travel days. Arrival and departure both count.
- Getting the map wrong. Croatia, Bulgaria and Romania are in. Cyprus and Ireland are not, and nor is the UK.
- Relying on “days left” to plan a long stay. Check every day of the trip instead.
Which countries are in the Schengen area
The Commission lists 29 countries, “25 EU Member States and 4 non-EU 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. Bulgaria and Romania were the last to join, on 1 January 2025. “Cyprus and Ireland are not part of the Schengen Area.”
Monaco, San Marino and Vatican City aren’t members, but their borders with France and Italy are open, so nothing records you leaving the area when you cross into them. CitizenDays counts days there as Schengen days, to be safe.
Who the rule applies to
The 90/180 rule covers short stays by people who aren’t citizens of an EU country, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway or Switzerland. That includes visitors from countries such as the US, Canada, the UK and Australia, who don’t need a visa for short trips.
- If you hold a short-stay visa, check the duration of stay printed on the visa sticker. If it’s shorter than 90 days, that is your limit, and the Commission says not to use its calculator.
- If you hold an EU residence permit or a long-stay visa, “you are not subject to the 90/180-day rule” in the country that issued it. Trips to the other Schengen countries are still limited: the EU describes these documents as allowing “free movement within the Schengen area for 90 days within any 180 days”.
- Some countries have older bilateral agreements that let certain nationalities stay longer in that one country. If you’re relying on one, check with that country’s embassy before you go.
What happens if you overstay
Since 10 April 2026, the EU’s Entry/Exit System records every entry and exit at the external border and calculates your remaining stay automatically. If you stay too long, it adds you to a list of overstayers that border, visa and immigration officers can see. What happens next depends on the country: the EU names removal, fines, detention and being prevented from coming back as possible consequences. We cover the system in The Entry/Exit System is live.
Questions people ask
Does the 90/180 rule reset after 180 days?
No. Each day you ask the question again, looking back 180 days from that day. Days leave the window one at a time, 180 days after you spent them.
If I leave for 90 days, do I get another 90?
Yes. The manual says “an absence for an uninterrupted period of 90 days allows for a new stay for up to 90 days”: after 90 days outside the area, the window can hold at most 90 days, all of them new.
Is it 90 days per country?
No. It is 90 days across all 29 Schengen countries together.
Do the day I arrive and the day I leave count?
Yes, both count as full days of stay.
Is “today” part of the 180 days?
Yes. The window is the day you are checking plus the 179 days before it.
Sources
- European Commission: Short-stay calculator
- European Commission: Short-stay calculator user manual (PDF)
- Schengen Borders Code, Regulation (EU) 2016/399
- European Commission: Schengen area
- Travel to Europe: Check how long you can stay (EES)
We last checked these sources on 5 October 2026.
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