Schengen 90/180 rule

What is the 90/180 rule

Non-EU citizens can stay in the Schengen area at most 90 days in any 180. The window is «rolling»: you count the days spent in the 180 days before the date you check.

How to fill it in

Write each stay on one line with the two dates in YYYY-MM-DD format. The reference date is usually your next entry day or today. It's an estimate: for official matters check with the authorities.

Why the window is called rolling

There are not ninety days a year to spend: there is a limit checked every single day. At any moment, you look back one hundred and eighty days and count those spent inside the area: if there are more than ninety, you are over. The consequence is that the count never resets on a fixed date.

Hence the commonest error: thinking that after the first of January you start again from zero. That is not so, and neither is it so after leaving: leaving stops the counter, it does not empty it. The days come back one at a time, as they drop out of the one-hundred-and-eighty-day window, which is why doing the sum in your head nearly always goes wrong.

How the days are counted, exactly

The day of entry and the day of exit both count in full, even if you arrived at midnight and left at dawn: a two-day trip uses two. What counts is days of physical presence in the area, not days of travel.

The area counts as a single country: going from France to Germany and then to Spain resets nothing, because you never left. And it is worth knowing that the Schengen area does not coincide with the European Union: some Union countries are outside it, and some non-Union countries are part of it.

What happens if you overstay

The count is not a formality: at the border the stamps are read, and with the electronic entry and exit system the check becomes automatic. The consequences range from a fine to a re-entry ban of months or years, and they stay on record.

It is worth knowing that a stamp can be illegible or missing, and that the burden of showing when you left stays with the traveller: keeping boarding passes, receipts and bookings is the simplest defence. An honest mistake is explained far more easily with documents than with memory.

The cases where the rule does not apply

To anyone with a residence permit or a national long-stay visa from a country in the area: that time does not count towards the ninety days. And, in the opposite direction, to Union citizens and their family members, who move under other rules.

Then there are the bilateral agreements concluded by some countries before Schengen, which in certain cases allow additional stays: they are old, contested and applied inconsistently, and relying on one without checking with the embassy is risky. This page does the arithmetic; the decision, when the days are at the limit, has to be taken with an official source.

Nearby tools

To count the days between two dates there is Difference between two dates and for working days Working days. For the rest of the trip Flight duration, Jet lag and Dialling codes.