Download for iOSHow the Schengen 90/180 rule works
If you visit the Schengen area without a long-stay visa, you can stay for up to 90 days in any 180-day period. The tricky part is that the 180-day period keeps rolling, so the answer to "how many days do I have left" changes every single day.
What the rule actually says
Your total stay in the Schengen area must be no more than 90 days in every 180 days. It does not matter how many countries you visit or how you split up your trips. Every day you spend inside the area counts towards the same total.
Which countries count
The Schengen area includes Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. Days in any of these add to the same 90-day total.
How to check your next trip
- Check the date you plan to leave the Schengen area on your next trip.
- Count back 180 days from that date to get the start of the 180-day period.
- Add up the days you have already spent in the Schengen area in that period, using the entry and exit stamps in your passport.
- Work out how many days you will spend on your next trip and add that to the total from the previous step.
- Check that the total is not more than 90.
Why it is easy to get wrong
Counting by hand works for a single trip, but it gets hard once you have several trips spread across the year. Because the window rolls, days drop off the back of your 180-day period as time passes, which can quietly give you more room, or push an old trip out of the count entirely. That is exactly the kind of arithmetic a tracker is good at.
Let the app do the counting
90 Days in Europe keeps a running total against the rolling window, so you always know how many of your 90 days are left before your next trip.
