Schengen 90/180 Calculator

How the 90/180 rule works

A visa-free short stay in the Schengen Area is limited to 90 days in any 180-day period. The regulation says how to read that: the 180-day period is the one preceding each day of stay (Regulation (EU) 2016/399, Article 6(1)). Three consequences follow, and the calculator on this page applies all three.

The window looks backward, and it moves. On any given day, count that day plus the 179 days before it. Tomorrow the window moves one day forward: the oldest day drops out and the new day comes in. There is no fixed half-year that starts in January or on the day of your first entry.

The entry day and the exit day both count in full. Arrive at 11 pm, leave at 6 am the next morning, and you have used two days. The Commission's manual for its own calculator states this directly: the date of entry is the first day of stay and the date of exit is the last (calculator manual).

A day is never counted twice. Two overlapping records, or two Schengen countries on one day, are still one day of presence. The calculator merges overlapping and back-to-back stays before counting, so the total is a count of days, not a sum of trip lengths.

Put together: on every day of a stay, the number of presence days in the 180-day window ending on that day must not exceed 90. Check mode does that arithmetic for one date. Plan mode runs it forward, day by day from a planned entry, and stops the day before the window would hold 91. The European Commission publishes its own tool for the same arithmetic (short-stay calculator); if a trip runs close to the limit, check it there as well.

Worked example: three stays

Someone visits Spain in January, Italy in April, and wants to come back in June 2026. The stays are entered exactly like this in the calculator:

Check on May 15, 2026, with stays 1 and 2 entered. The window runs from November 17, 2025 to May 15, 2026. Both stays fall inside it, so 60 days are used and 30 remain. The verdict is "Within the limit". The next day frees up on July 9, 2026, which is January 10 plus 180 days, and the whole first stay is back by August 7, 2026, which is February 8 plus 180 days.

Plan from June 1, 2026. Sixty days sit in the window on June 1, so the calculator answers "You can stay up to 30 days, until June 30, 2026". On June 30 the window runs from January 2 to June 30 and holds all three stays: 30 + 30 + 30 = 90, exactly at the limit and still compliant. One more day, July 1, would be the 91st, and Check mode with an exit of July 1 says "Over the limit since July 1, 2026".

Want 45 days instead? Type 45 into "I want to stay" with June 1 as the planned entry: the answer is "Earliest entry: June 9, 2026". From June 8 only 30 days fit; from June 9 the January stay starts dropping out of the window one day for each day added, so 60 fit.

After the third stay. Add stay 3 and plan a week from July 1, 2026: nothing fits on July 1, because the window is full, and the earliest entry for 7 days is July 9, 2026, the day the January days begin to leave.

Multiple trips and the rolling window

Short trips add up in exactly the same way as one long stay. Six visits of 15 days inside a 180-day span are 90 days, and the seventh visit is over the limit on its first day. What the rolling window does that a calendar limit does not: days come back one at a time, each of them 180 days after it was spent. A five-day trip in January returns its five days over five consecutive days in July, and the calculator's "Next release" line names the first of those days and the day the whole oldest stay is back.

The most common mistake is to treat a border crossing as a reset. It is not. Leaving the Schengen Area for a day, a week or a month removes nothing from the window; it only stops new days from being added while you are away. Someone who spent 89 days from January 1 to March 30, 2026 and re-enters on April 1 has one day, not ninety (Article 6(1) counts the 180 days preceding each day of stay, so the March days are all still there). The only absence that restores the full allowance is an uninterrupted one of 90 days, which is what the Commission's manual says too (manual).

The second mistake is counting nights. A hotel booking of two nights is three days of presence: the arrival day, the day in between and the departure day. The calculator asks for entry and exit dates and counts both ends, as the Commission's manual prescribes (manual).

The third is to look only at today. Compliance is checked on every day of a stay, not only at the end. A planned trip can be within the limit on its first day and over it on its tenth, which is why Plan mode simulates the trip day by day rather than subtracting a total.

Overstaying

A traveler who no longer fulfills the entry conditions, and the 90-day limit is one of them, is refused entry by a substantiated decision under Article 14 of the Schengen Borders Code (Regulation (EU) 2016/399). Beyond refusal at the border, fines, entry bans and later refusals are possible; the penalties are national, set by the country that finds the overstay, not by the Code, so what happens depends on where and by how much. Since April 10, 2026 the Entry/Exit System records entries and exits digitally and detects overstayers automatically (European Commission), so an overstay that once depended on someone reading stamps is now a database record. If you are close to the limit, run the dates through the Commission's calculator before you travel (short-stay calculator) and keep proof of your exits.

The Entry/Exit System (EES)

As of September 10, 2026, the EES is fully operational. The European Commission announced on April 10, 2026 that the system had become fully operational across all Schengen countries, replacing passport stamps with digital records of the entries and exits of non-EU nationals (Commission news, April 10, 2026). It applies to non-EU nationals traveling for a short stay, records facial images, fingerprints and passport data, and allows the automatic detection of overstayers (EES policy page). Operations had started progressively on October 12, 2025 (same announcement).

For the count itself nothing changes: 90 in 180 is still the rule and the arithmetic on this page is the same. What changes is who holds the record. Before, your own tally and your passport stamps were the evidence; now the border system has an exact list of your entries and exits, and your tally should match it. A calculator remains useful for the question the system does not answer for you in advance: how long the next trip can be.

ETIAS

ETIAS is a pre-travel authorization for visa-free visitors, separate from the 90/180 rule, and it is not in operation as of September 2026. The dated status, the 30 countries it will cover and the fee are on Is ETIAS live yet?.

EU vs Schengen

The rule is about the Schengen Area, not the European Union, and the two lists differ. The Schengen Area has 29 members, listed in the Commission's calculator manual (manual, footnote 4; Wikipedia: Schengen Area): 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. Days in any of them count toward the same 90.

• In the EU but not in Schengen: Ireland and Cyprus. Stays there are not taken into account, in the manual's words (manual). Cyprus is nevertheless one of the 30 ETIAS countries (source).
• In Schengen but not in the EU: Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland. Short stays there count in, per the same manual (manual).
• Recent members. Croatia joined on January 1, 2023; Bulgaria and Romania joined in full on January 1, 2025 (source). Days there count like anywhere else in the Area.
• The United Kingdom is outside both the EU and Schengen; stays in the UK do not count in (manual), and they do not reset anything either.

Who the rule applies to

Article 6(1) sets the entry conditions for third-country nationals on short stays, which includes visa-exempt travelers such as citizens of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia (source) and holders of a short-stay Schengen visa, whose visa may allow fewer days but never more than 90 in 180 (Regulation (EU) 2016/399). It does not apply to EU citizens, who move under free-movement rules. Periods of stay authorized under a residence permit or a long-stay visa are not taken into account in the calculation (Article 6(2), same regulation), so someone who held a residence permit in France and then travels visa-free does not carry those days into the window. Two exceptions named in the Commission's manual: holders of ordinary Brazilian passports travel under an older definition, 3 months in the 6 months following the first entry, so the calculator is not meant for them; and some Schengen states still apply old bilateral visa-waiver agreements that can allow nationals of countries such as Canada, New Zealand or the United States extra time in that one state, which no calculator can model (manual).

Track it automatically

PlanToTrip, an AI trip planner for iPhone and iPad, keeps a Schengen 90/180 counter next to the itinerary: days used and days left are counted from the trips planned in the app, so a planned trip counts itself (product facts). Entering past stays by hand, importing days from photo date and place tags (read on the device, never uploaded, and kept current automatically once allowed), counting days from recorded place visits, the draggable 180-day timeline and the forward planner are Pro. The counter is an estimate from known dates and says so on the screen; it is explicitly not an official border record. No account or login is needed. Pro costs $9.99 per month or $59.99 per year with a 3-day free trial, and the first trip is generated and previewed free.

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