Traveler: how we calculate your days

1. What Traveler is, and what it is not

Traveler helps travelers keep a running count of two things: how many days of a visa or visa-free allowance they have used in a country, and how many days they have spent in a country toward its tax-residency threshold. You enter the stays yourself. Traveler does the arithmetic and shows an estimate.

Traveler does not file anything, does not talk to any government, does not grant or deny entry, and does not determine your legal tax residency. Immigration officers and tax authorities make those decisions on their own rules and records, which may differ from ours.

2. Visa rules are relative to your passport

The same destination means different rules to different people. A Spanish citizen has free movement inside the Schengen Area; a US citizen gets a 90-day visa-free allowance; a citizen of many other countries needs a visa before travel. So Traveler asks for your passport (or two, for dual nationals) and resolves the rule for your nationality. For a dual national, Traveler shows the more favorable of the two passports.

3. How we count visa days

• Schengen 90/180. For the Schengen Area we apply the standard rule: at most 90 days of stay in any rolling 180-day period, pooled across all Schengen member states. The same 90/180 math applies whether you enter visa-free (Annex II) or on a short-stay Type C visa (Annex I).
• Other rolling windows. A few countries use their own rolling window (for example 90 days in any 180, or 180 days in a year). Where we know of one, we apply it; otherwise a visa-free allowance is treated as a per-entry allowance.
• Counting convention. We count both the day you arrive and every day you are present as a day in-country, in UTC. This is the conservative convention used by immigration authorities. An open (ongoing) stay counts through today.
• Permits that lift the cap. If you record a residence or long-stay permit, Traveler stops counting a short-stay cap for you there, because you are no longer a short-stay visitor. Inside Schengen, a residence permit from one member is treated as lifting the short-stay cap area-wide.

4. How we count tax-residency days

Tax residency is separate from your visa. Many countries treat spending 183 days or more in a calendar year as a trigger for tax residency, so Traveler counts your days in each country during the current tax year against that threshold (some countries use a different number, which we apply where we know it). The day count is only one of several tests real tax authorities use. Ties to a country such as a home, family, or center of economic interest can make you a tax resident on far fewer days, and totalization or double-tax treaties can change the outcome. Treat the tax figure as a prompt to look into it, never as a determination.

5. Where the data comes from

The passport-to-destination requirements are seeded from an open, publicly maintained dataset (the passport-index dataset, published under the MIT license) covering visa-free, visa-on- arrival, electronic authorization, e-visa, and visa-required statuses across roughly 200 passports and destinations. On top of that we maintain a small curated layer for area rules the raw dataset does not express, such as Schengen pooling, specific rolling windows, and tax thresholds. The dataset carries a version and a last-reviewed date, shown at the top of this page, and is refreshed periodically.

6. Important limitations

• Rules change. A requirement can change between our reviews, and your result may be based on outdated data.
• The dataset covers the general case for an ordinary passport. It does not capture every nuance: bilateral visa-waiver agreements, specific visa sub-types, purpose-of-travel conditions, prior overstays, entry bans, border-officer discretion, minors, diplomatic or service passports, and similar exceptions.
• Traveler only knows the stays you enter. If your entries are incomplete or inexact, the counts will be too.
• Day-boundary and time-zone handling is done at day granularity in UTC, which can differ by a day from how a specific authority counts.
• ETIAS, ESTA, ETA and similar pre-authorizations, and e-visa or visa-on-arrival processes, have their own eligibility, cost, and processing times that Traveler does not manage.

7. Always verify with official sources

Before you travel or make a decision based on a Traveler estimate, verify the current requirement with an official source: the destination government's immigration or foreign-ministry website, the relevant consulate or embassy, or, for tax, the national tax authority. For anything with real consequences, consult a qualified immigration lawyer or tax adviser. If you find a figure in Traveler that looks wrong, please tell us so we can review it.

8. No warranty and no liability

Traveler is provided on an "as is" and "as available" basis, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including accuracy, completeness, or fitness for a particular purpose. To the fullest extent permitted by law, HIHODL and its affiliates are not liable for any loss, penalty, fine, denied entry, overstay, tax consequence, or other damage arising from your use of, or reliance on, Traveler estimates. You remain solely responsible for your own compliance with immigration and tax law. Your use of Traveler is also governed by our Terms of Service (see the "Informational Tools and Estimates" section) and our Privacy Policy.

9. Contact

Questions about how Traveler calculates something, or a correction to report? Email hello@hihodl.xyz.