Schengen wants 90 in 180. Spain wants fewer than 183 in the calendar year. HMRC counts midnights from April to April. One calendar, three numbers — and a single "days abroad" figure gets at least one of them wrong.
Since 2021 a British passport gets 90 days in any rolling 180-day window, and the allowance is shared by all 29 Schengen countries. A weekend in Paris on the way to Alicante is two Spanish days as far as the border is concerned. The window moves every day, so a day only comes back 180 days after you used it — there is no reset on 1 January and no reset when you go home.
Since April 2026 this counter is kept by the Entry/Exit System, not by stamps. The officer sees a number; arguing with it is slow.
Spend more than 183 days in Spain in a calendar year and you are a Spanish tax resident, with worldwide income on the table. This counter is Spain only — days in Portugal do not count — and it is a plain total: leaving does not reset it, 1 January does.
Two Spanish specifics. Any part of a day counts as a day. And sporadic absences — short trips out — are counted as days in Spain unless you can show you are tax resident somewhere else, which is one reason the UK evidence in counter three matters even when you never get near 183.
Portugal uses more than 183 days in any twelve-month period that touches the tax year, so a long autumn plus a long spring can add up across the new year in a way they never do in Spain.
HMRC's Statutory Residence Test counts the days on which you are in the UK at midnight, in the tax year from 6 April to 5 April. Fly out at 9 pm and that day is not a UK day; land at 11 pm and it is. 183 midnights make you UK resident automatically. Below that, the answer depends on how many ties you keep — home, family, work, the days you spent in the UK the year before — and the more ties, the fewer midnights you may spend and still be non-resident.
There is no single safe number in this test. There is a single unit: midnights, not days, over a year that starts in April.
A winter in Spain from 1 November to 28 January is 89 days. Easter is out — on Good Friday the window still holds all 89 of them. The November days start dropping out of the window on 30 April, so from 1 May you can stay again: up to 29 July, when the summer stay itself hits 90. Then home, and back on 1 November.
Every day of the allowance used, none over. One extra night is an overstay.
28 in January, 90 in the summer, 61 in the autumn. Four days under the line.
Midnights at home. UK resident automatically — but by three nights, and only if travel days fall the right way.
Three counters, three answers, all from the same calendar — and the margins are four days, three nights and zero. A spreadsheet with a "days abroad" column cannot produce these three numbers, because they do not share a window, a country set or even a definition of a day.
Daysabroad keeps each counter as its own rule, fed by the same automatic log of your crossings: the Schengen Area template for the rolling 90/180 across all 29 countries, a Tax residency threshold set to 183 for Spain, and United Kingdom — tax residence, which counts by the midnight rule so the day you fly out is not held against you. Each one is a tile on the home-screen widget, and each warns before its line, not after.
The log itself — dates, places, the boarding pass attached to each stay — is also the evidence for the sporadic-absences argument, should Spain ever ask.
At most 90 days in any rolling 180-day window, counted across the whole Schengen area. Over a year that caps out at roughly 180 days, and only if the stays are spaced exactly right.
Against the Schengen 90, yes — the allowance is shared by all 29 Schengen countries. Against Spain's 183-day tax test, no — that counts days in Spain only.
Days on which you are in the UK at midnight, in the tax year running 6 April to 5 April. The day you fly out normally does not count; the day you fly in does.
Usually, if you keep Spain under 183 days in the calendar year, keep the UK at 183 midnights or more, and stay inside the Schengen 90/180. Spain can still count sporadic absences as days in Spain unless you prove residency elsewhere, so keep the UK evidence.
Daysabroad counts Schengen, Spain and the UK from the same automatic log of your crossings — each by its own rules, each warning before the line.
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