The Schengen 90/180 rule: how to count your days

How does the 90/180 rule work?

Visitors who enter the Schengen area visa-free, and holders of short-stay Schengen visas, may spend at most 90 days inside the area within any period of 180 days. The limit applies to the whole area combined, not to each country separately: a week in France, a week in Italy and a week in Spain add up to 21 days against the same single allowance.

The rule covers tourists, business visitors, and anyone else on a short stay. It does not apply to people who hold a residence permit or a national long-stay visa for a Schengen country. Citizens of EU and Schengen states are not subject to it at all.

The test you must pass is simple to state and easy to get wrong: on every single day of your stay, look back 180 days and count your days of presence. That count must never exceed 90. The checking happens at the border, and since the EU Entry/Exit System (EES) replaced passport stamps with a digital record, the arithmetic is done by a computer rather than a border officer flipping pages.

How are the 180 days counted?

The 180-day period is not a semester, not a calendar half-year, and not a block that starts when you first enter. It is a rolling window: on any given day, the relevant period is that day plus the 179 days before it. Tomorrow, the window slides forward by one day, drops the oldest day, and the count is taken again.

The table below shows the window sliding across three consecutive check dates in 2026. Notice that each window keeps 179 of the previous window's days and swaps exactly one:

This is why old trips matter for longer than most people expect. A day spent in the Schengen area keeps counting against you for a full 180 days after it happened, then silently ages out.

Do entry and exit days count?

Yes, both count. The day you enter and the day you leave are each counted as full Schengen days, even if you land at 23:50 or fly out at 06:00. A trip that runs from Friday evening to Sunday morning therefore uses three days of your allowance, not one and a half.

There is no rounding and no hourly credit. If your passport is scanned into the area at any point during a calendar day, that day counts. Plan tight itineraries accordingly: an overnight layover that touches two calendar dates costs two days.

Does the counter reset when I leave?

No. Leaving the Schengen area does not reset anything. Every day you were present during the last 180 days keeps counting against the 90-day allowance until it slides out of the window, one day at a time. There is no date on the calendar when your count returns to zero.

This is the single most common misunderstanding about the rule. A quick trip to London or Belgrade does not buy you a fresh 90 days. What actually restores your allowance is time: each day you stay outside, the window slides forward, and eventually your old presence days fall off the back of it.

Two worked examples with real dates

Which countries are in the Schengen area?

As of 2026 the Schengen area counts 29 member countries: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.

Three recent changes trip people up. Bulgaria and Romania completed their accession in stages, with air and sea borders opening in March 2024 and land borders in January 2025, so days spent there now count in full. Cyprus is an EU member but not yet in Schengen: it cleared the EU's technical evaluation in June 2026 and is expected to join once the EU Council approves, so days spent there do not count toward your 90 until accession takes effect. And note the countries that are not in Schengen despite being in Europe: Ireland stays out by choice and runs its own entry rules, while the United Kingdom left the EU entirely. Days in Dublin or London never count toward your 90.

Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland are in Schengen without being EU members, so days spent skiing in Zermatt or stopping over in Reykjavik count exactly like days in Paris.

What happens if I overstay?

Overstaying carries real consequences: fines, deportation orders in serious cases, and entry bans that can run for years. Since the EU Entry/Exit System began logging border crossings digitally, an overstay of even one day is visible to officers at your next crossing. Enforcement severity varies by country, but the record follows you across the whole area.

The practical fallout is often worse than the fine itself. An overstay on your record can complicate future ETIAS travel authorisations, visa applications and residence permit requests, because each of those asks about past compliance. Some countries, Germany among them, prosecute overstays consistently; others handle short accidental overstays with a warning and a fine at exit. You do not get to choose which officer you meet.

How do I track my days automatically?

You can track the rule by hand with a spreadsheet, and plenty of people do, but the rolling window makes manual counting fragile: every planned trip requires re-checking the window against every past trip. One forgotten weekend in Copenhagen throws the whole calculation off.

Staydays does the counting for you. The app detects which country you are in each day using low-power background location, keeps the day log on your iPhone, and recalculates the rolling 180-day window daily. It warns you before you approach the limit and shows the earliest safe return date after a long stay. Your location history never leaves your device and your private iCloud.