Proving your travel days: records that hold up in a residency audit

What records do tax authorities accept?

Anything that independently places you in a specific place on a specific date: border entry and exit records, boarding passes and train tickets, hotel invoices and leases, card transactions, and phone location data. No single record type is required. Auditors build a day-by-day calendar from whatever exists, and the taxpayer who can fill more days with third-party evidence wins more days.

The ranking that matters is independence. A government border log outranks an airline booking, which outranks a card charge, which outranks your own diary entry, because each step down is easier for you to have fabricated or gotten wrong. In practice the categories stack:

Are passport stamps still enough?

Less and less. Since 10 April 2026 the EU Entry/Exit System has replaced stamping for non-EU travelers across the Schengen area, recording entries and exits digitally instead. Stamps you do still collect elsewhere are often smudged, misdated or simply missed at busy crossings, which is why they work better as supporting evidence than as the backbone of a day count.

The shift cuts both ways. The EES means border authorities now hold a precise, computed record of your Schengen days, so understating them is no longer possible. But it also means a clean official record of your presence exists that you can obtain and hand to a tax authority, something a stamped passport never quite delivered. What EES does not cover is everywhere else: US domestic travel, US state lines, and most of Asia and the Americas still generate no such record, and state-level audits in particular run entirely on private evidence.

How do I request my EES travel record?

You have a legal right to access the data the EES holds on you, including your recorded entries and exits. Requests go to the data controller or data protection officer of a country you traveled to, preferably one you actually crossed into, and each Schengen state publishes its own contact point. Entry and exit records are kept for three years, or five years where no exit was recorded.

The EU's official page on data held by the EES lists what is stored, the retention periods, and the access, correction and deletion rights. Two practical notes. First, the three-year retention window means the EES cannot substitute for your own long-term records; a residency dispute about 2026 can surface in 2030, after the official record is gone. Second, if you believe a crossing was recorded wrongly, the same mechanism lets you request correction, which is far easier to argue when your own log shows what the record should say.

How do auditors weigh the evidence?

Day by day, with defaults that favor the tax authority. New York's Nonresident Audit Guidelines are the clearest public example: the taxpayer must keep records adequate to prove the day count, any part of a day in the state counts in full, and undocumented days tend to be resolved as New York days. The UK's Statutory Residence Test counts midnights, so the question becomes where you were at the end of each disputed day, down to the flight time.

What auditors distrust most is evidence created after the question was asked. A spreadsheet assembled during the audit, however honest, is a claim. A log written day by day through the year, consistent with the boarding passes and card statements around it, is corroboration. The difference in weight is the whole game when the count sits at 181 versus 184.

Two worked examples with real 2026 dates

What does a system that holds up look like?

Four habits cover nearly every audit. Keep the terminal documents: used boarding passes, train tickets, hotel invoices, into one folder per year, saved the week they happen. Let your card leave a trail: one small local charge on travel days beats a wallet of cash. Request official records while they exist, like your EES log inside its three-year window. And keep one continuous day log that states, for every date, which country and state you were in.

That last item is the one nobody maintains by hand past February. Staydays keeps it automatically: it logs which country you are in each day using low-power background location, stores the history on your iPhone and in your private iCloud, and exports a dated report. It is your own record rather than a government one, which is exactly the point: it is contemporaneous, complete, and consistent with the third-party evidence around it, which is what auditors ask of a day log.