Schengen 90/180 calculator

The calculator above uses the same rules engine as the Residay app, validated against the same golden test vectors — including the worked examples published in the European Commission’s short-stay calculator user manual. It runs entirely in your browser.

What the rule actually says

Third-country nationals who do not hold a residence permit or a national long-stay visa may stay in the Schengen area for at most 90 days within any rolling 180-day period. The Schengen states are counted together as a single territory: three weeks split between Spain, Italy and Germany is counted exactly as three weeks in any one of them.

The window rolls — this is what people get wrong

The most common misunderstanding is treating the limit as an allowance that refills. It does not. There is no calendar period, no annual reset, and crucially nothing happens when you cross the border outward.

Because the window rolls, each day you spend drops out of consideration exactly 180 days after it occurred. Two consequences follow, and both matter for planning:

• A long absence does not bank extra days. The maximum you can ever have available is 90 days within the current window, however long you have been away.
• Leaving starts the window draining, not resetting. Days you have used keep counting against you until they age out one by one.

This is why a pattern of frequent short visits can drift toward the limit even though no single trip looks long. What matters is the density of presence inside the trailing window.

A worked example

Suppose you spend 1 January to 31 March inside the area — exactly 90 days, using the entire allowance. On 31 March you have zero days remaining, and the first day frees up only when 1 January falls out of the window. That happens on 30 June: the window ending on any date spans 180 days including that date, and by 30 June it no longer reaches back as far as 1 January. From then on your allowance recovers a day at a time, not in a lump.

The calculator shows both of these dates directly: the date you would breach the limit if you stayed, and the next date a day frees up.

Which days count

• Arrival and departure days both count in full, regardless of the time of day.
• Arriving and leaving on the same day counts as one day present.
• Airside transit — staying in the international zone without passing border control — does not count.
• Days under a residence permit or long-stay visa do not count against the limit, but only for the state that issued them. The calculator asks about this, because it cannot be observed from travel dates alone.

Who is in and who is not

The area covers 29 states, and the membership list is not the same as the European Union’s. Bulgaria and Romania are full members and their days count. Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland are members without being EU states. Ireland and Cyprus are not in the Schengen area — Ireland operates the Common Travel Area with the United Kingdom, and Cyprus applies its own national rules, so days in either place do not count toward this limit.

The Entry/Exit System changes the enforcement, not the rule

The EU’s Entry/Exit System registers non-EU travellers biometrically at the external border and records each entry and exit automatically, replacing manual passport stamping. The 90/180 rule itself is unchanged. What changes is that the count is now computed from an authoritative database rather than inferred from ink, which removes the ambiguity that inconsistent or illegible stamps used to provide.

The practical implication is straightforward: a border officer’s arithmetic and your own should agree, and if they do not, the burden of showing where you actually were falls on you. Keeping your own dated record has become more valuable, not less. Consequences for overstaying are set by each member state and can include entry bans.

What this calculator does not do

It answers one question, on one day, from the dates you type in. It does not know about your residence permit unless you tell it, it cannot see the trips you forget, and it does not keep a record you can hand to anyone. For a single planning question that is enough. For an ongoing obligation — or for evidence you may need to produce later — a count you maintain by hand is the weak link.