The UK “180-day rule”: how long can you stay in the UK?

A Standard Visitor can usually stay in the UK for up to 6 months on each visit. That is the limit written into the rules, and it applies per visit, whether you came on a visit visa or, as a non-visa national, with an Electronic Travel Authorisation.

There is no number in the rules for how many days you may spend in the UK in a year. What there is instead is a requirement: a visitor must not be living in the UK through frequent or successive visits, or making it their main home. That requirement is judged on your pattern of travel, not measured against a figure.

So “180 days” is a real number — it is roughly six months — but “180 days in any 365” is a rule of thumb travellers made up to stay on the right side of that judgement. Useful; not the law.

Six months is the standard period of permission for a visitor, and six months is about 181 to 184 days depending on where in the year you start. Rounded down, it became “180 days”, and the figure stuck because it is easy to remember and easy to count.

The period runs per visit, from the day you are admitted. A visit visa issued for two, five or ten years allows any number of visits within its validity, each of them still capped at the length endorsed on it — usually six months.

The Schengen area has a defined arithmetic: count back 180 days, add up the days inside, stay under 90. The UK has nothing of the kind for visitors. The Home Office’s own guidance to its caseworkers is explicit that there is no specified maximum period a person may spend in the UK in any period — no “six months in twelve”.

What replaces the arithmetic is an assessment. At the border and on a visa application, the question is whether you are a genuine visitor: whether you will leave at the end of the visit, whether you have somewhere else that is your home, and whether the number and length of your visits amounts to living here. Someone who has spent more of the last year in the UK than out of it will be asked about it; someone who has visited three times for a fortnight will not.

That makes the rule of thumb sensible for a different reason than people think. Staying under about half the year is not a line the law draws; it is a way of keeping your pattern clearly on the visitor side of a line an officer draws.

The six-month visit applies to everyone admitted as a Standard Visitor. What differs by nationality is how you get in: visa nationals apply for a visit visa before travelling; non-visa nationals — which since Brexit includes citizens of EU countries — need an Electronic Travel Authorisation, applied for online, valid for two years and for any number of visits of up to six months each.

Irish citizens are outside all of this under the Common Travel Area. Anyone with UK permission for another purpose — work, study, family — is under the conditions of that permission, not the visitor rules.

For a visitor the counting is simple, which is why so many people do not bother to do it and then cannot answer the question at the desk:

• Count from the day you were admitted. The permission is usually six months from that date, not six months of days.
• Count in days, not months, if you are keeping a running total across visits — a “month” is between 28 and 31 days and drifts.
• Count the day you arrived and the day you left as days in the UK if you want the cautious figure. Nothing in the visitor rules turns on that choice, but the tax residence test does — and counts differently.
• Count UK days separately from Schengen days. The UK is outside the area; a day in London touches neither your 90 nor your 180.

The 183-day rule and how tax residence counts days

Three visits in one year: 5 January to 2 March, 20 May to 10 August, and 1 October to 30 November. Counting both ends of each, that is 57, 83 and 61 days — 201 in the year.

No single visit is anywhere near six months, so nothing in the length of the stays breaks a rule. But 201 days is more than half the year, in three blocks with short gaps between them, and that is the shape of a pattern a border officer is entitled to ask about: what you were doing, where you live, and whether the next visit is really a visit.

The same 201 days spread as a fortnight a month reads differently again. The total is only part of it; the pattern is the rest — which is exactly what makes a written record of every visit more useful than a number in your head.

The visitor route is simple to state and easy to get wrong:

• “180 days a year is the rule.” It is not written anywhere. The rule is six months per visit plus the genuine-visitor requirement; 180 days a year is a habit, and a reasonable one.
• “Leave for a day and come back for another six months.” A new entry is a new decision by the officer. Leaving does not entitle you to six more months; it invites the question of what the last six were for.
• “The ETA is a visa.” It is an authorisation to travel. It does not guarantee entry and it does not change the six-month limit.
• “UK days count against my Schengen 90.” They do not. The two are counted separately, and one being fine says nothing about the other.
• “Six months is 180 days exactly.” It is a date six months on, which can be as many as 184 days. Count from the date on your permission.

Every visa application asks for your travel history — the UK’s own form goes back ten years — and every arrival is a moment an officer can ask what you have been doing. The answer that works is dates: when you came, when you left, where you were in between. Passport stamps fade and, since the UK checks arrivals electronically and does not always stamp, may not exist at all.

A contemporaneous log is the difference between remembering and reconstructing. It is also the only way to see your own pattern before someone else describes it to you.

DaysHere logs each UK visit as an entry date and an exit date, and counts the days. For a passport it knows the visitor rule for, it suggests the standard six-month-per-visit allowance and shows where that figure comes from, for you to check before it becomes your rule.

If you keep to a yearly ceiling of your own — 180 days, or any other — a calendar-year rule counts your visits against it and warns you before you reach it. Your whole history is there to read, and can be exported as a CSV when a form asks for it.

What the app does not do is decide whether you are a genuine visitor. That judgement is the officer’s; the record that informs it can be yours.

This page describes the UK visitor rules as published on GOV.UK when it was last updated. It is not legal or immigration advice and cannot account for your nationality, your immigration history or a change in the rules. The sources below are the authority; confirm your own position with them before you travel.